Ken Burns - Mapping Americas National Parks

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Get an insider look at the U.S. National Park Service to see how they use maps and geospatial technology to protect and manage Americas national parks.

Maps easily cap your first greeting upon arrival at a national park, allowing you to visualize its vastness, plan your trip, and keep a compact souvenir of your visit. But for the U.S. National Park Service (NPS), maps do more than provide guidance and navigation. Maps help the NPS protect visitors and natural resources. They help manage fires, both unplanned and prescribed. They provide a basis for preserving cultural resources, such as archeological sites and historic buildings, and for establishing needed facilities, infrastructure, and transportation.

The maps in Mapping Americas National Parks: Preserving Our Natural and Cultural Treasures are not only beautiful representations of special places. Within the maps are layers of geographic informationa bevy of research and sciencethat the NPS uses to perform these myriad essential services and ultimately fulfill its mission.

With over 240 full-color maps and photographs of national parks, monuments, battlefields, historic sites, lakeshores, seashores, scenic rivers and trails, and more, Mapping Americas National Parks takes you on a journey through our most treasured locations and shows how geographic information system (GIS) software helps the NPS keep the balance between park enjoyment and preservation.

Discover how GIS helps the NPS:

• provide stewardship for individual wildlife species and entire ecosystems;
• analyze where people are most and least likely to get stranded and where to distribute assets in search and rescue operations;
• develop strategic plans, budgets, and protection for fire management; and
• share intelligence on wildlife trafficking, zoonotic diseases, field medicine protocols, and more.

Go behind the scenes to see how mapping and geospatial analysis support the full range of NPS natural resource stewardship and science activities. With NPS planning aided by geospatial technology, future generations of park visitorsyour children and their childrenwill enjoy our national parks for years to come.

Cover credits: Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute, Chad Lopez, Kass Green & Associates, NPS, USGS.Esri Press, 380 New York Street, Redlands, California 92373-8100
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Tom Patterson, NPS Harpers Ferry Center for Media Services (retired)

Maps and the US National Park Service (NPS) mission are inextricably linked. The founding legislation of the NPS, the Organic Act of 1916, famously describes the dual, and sometimes conflicting, mission of the agency:

....to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.

To achieve both objectivesenjoyment and preservationthe NPS relies heavily on maps. Consider enjoyment. A map is the first information that visitors receive from the friendly ranger when entering a park. Its primary function is orientation and navigation; the map guides them to the visitor center, points of interest, and various facilities that make for a comfortable and safe visit. But that is only part of what the map does. It can also tell interpretive stories about things not readily apparentfor example, troop movements at a site that today looks more like a manicured park than a battlefield, previous geologic events, and future climate change. As an interpretive tool, the visitor map helps connect the tangible with the intangible, allowing people to better understand and appreciate the park they are in.