Sabbaticals in the Parks Program

Program Information

The National Park Service (NPS) is charged to preserve the nation's unique natural and cultural resources. A thorough understanding of those resources is essential to their long-term preservation. Such understanding requires a sound scientific basis. Hence, state-of-the-art science is a necessary and important tool in resource stewardship and the effective management of the National Park System. National parks are also unique laboratories for scientific research.

The NPS has a twofold scientific responsibility - to use the best available science in park management and to encourage research in parks that benefits society as a whole. To effectively undertake these dual responsibilities - "science for parks" and "parks for science" the NPS must enlist the help of the academic community and facilitate scientific inquiry in the parks.

The Sabbatical in the Parks Program was created to assist in arranging faculty sabbaticals to conduct research and other scholarly activity, which provides usable knowledge for NPS management and/or advances science and human understanding.

Science for parks and parks for science.

Examples of Sabbaticals in the Parks

Sabbaticals taken in National Park System units provide the NPS with scientific and scholarly expertise. Such expertise encompasses many disciplines important to managing park resources and providing services to park visitors. Sabbaticals in parks also increase the interaction of national parks with the scientific community and complement the research of the USGS Biological Resources Division, NPS regional science support programs, Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Units, and other research occurring in NPS units. Sabbaticals in parks can play an important role in promoting the use of national parks for the advancement of science and human knowledge. The sabbatical program is one part of the Natural Resource Challenge, a broad multi-year initiative to increase resource preservation and science in parks.

The following examples illustrate some of the ways park sabbaticals inform park management and offer technical and educational assistance to host parks.

• A geology professor divides her sabbatical between five parks. At each unit she completes a technical evaluation of the park's interpretation of its geological features. She creates geology training guides and conducts workshops for interpreters and resource managers, incorporating the most recent theoretical and applied research on the geological history of the area and her interest in the relationship between geologic features and the parks' ecology. In consultation with resource managers and support office staff, she develops a proposal to conduct further research on the geological and ecological interface in two of the parks. At her home university, she uses her Sabbatical in the Parks experience to advise students in an interdisciplinary environmental studies program.



• A sociology professor, on sabbatical, works with park managers and the local Chamber of Commerce to study visitor carrying capacity of park resources and associated human impacts experienced during the peak tourist season. He helps the Chamber of Commerce develop a marketing plan for the "shoulder tourist seasons." He designs and facilitates a workshop, for park staff and gateway community residents, on ecological and economic carrying capacity and resource and business sustainability. At his home university, he uses his sabbatical experience to update a graduate course dealing with the potentials and limits of natural resource-based tourism in protected areas.



• A wildlife ecologist uses his sabbatical to design a research protocol to monitor the response of grazing animals to the reintroduction of gray wolves into the park ecosystem. He designs an interpretive program focusing on the impacts of gray wolves on the park's wildlife and plant species. He also conducts a training session for the interpretive staff, which orients them to his research, current theories on predator-prey dynamics, and the ecosystem effects of gray wolf introduction. He works on a book on the history and ecology of gray wolves in the region.



• An anthropology professor, on sabbatical in a national park preserving ancient cultural ruins, tests a new remote sensing method for identifying signatures of probable archaeological sites. She trains and leads volunteers in surface surveys of undocumented regions of the park and correlates those surveys with the remote sensing data. She completes a manuscript synthesizing recent research, which utilizes remote sensing in an archaeological study. She presents her work at an international conference on technological applications in anthropology.

Benefits to Parks

• High-quality research, identified as essential by park management, will be carried out at minimal agency expense.



• Visiting faculty members can provide training and technical assistance for park staff in their areas of scientific expertise.



• Park sabbaticals leverage existing resources for applied science that directly benefits park management.



• Visiting scientists can enhance park staff's appreciation of the role of science in park management.



• Sabbatical research in parks can expand the general base of scientific knowledge.



• Sabbatical research and reporting can be done collaboratively with NPS scientists.



• Research conducted by university scientists during sabbaticals can advance the credibility of the NPS within the academic and scientific communities.



• Because sabbatical faculty members are fully or partially compensated by their university, they can be hosted by NPS units that otherwise could not afford this expertise.



• Experience working in national parks during a sabbatical may motivate faculty to do additional research in parks, encourage their students to do so, and promote park-related research among their colleagues.