Key NPCA Wildlife Program Campaigns

Since 1919, National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) has advocated for America’s National Parks, including their beloved wildlife.

NPCA’s Protecting National Park Wildlife program advances goals that support species conservation as well as cross-cutting strategies to combat systemic threats like habitat destruction, unsustainable management, and the global biodiversity and climate change crises.  

NPCA leverages the strong legal protections and public support of parks to ensure a better future for wildlife by: (1) CONNECTING park wildlife to healthy habitat outside park boundaries for their long-term survival; (2) PROTECTING park wildlife from mismanagement by state and federal agencies, including unsustainable hunting practices; and (3) RESTORING keystone species to national parks as well as their critical habitat outside park boundaries. 

Katmai and Lake Clark National Parks: Brown Bear

Protecting the Bears of Alaska’s Bear Coast: Katmai and Lake Clark National Parks host the densest population of brown bears in the world. Fattening annually on salmon, these huge bears are the keystone predator in this remarkable ecosystem. NPCA is working with our partners to protect park bears from two proposed gold and copper mines in the region, offshore oil and gas spills, overhunting, and visitor impacts.

Gates of the Arctic National Preserve: Caribou

Defend Against Mismanagement: The Western Arctic Caribou Herd in Northwest Alaska which migrates annually in and around Gates of the Arctic National Park is a natural wonder of the world. Over 250,000 caribou travel 2,700 miles on one of longest annual land migrations on earth. Caribou are vital to these tundra and taiga ecosystems as well as to many of the people who call the region home. Learn more from our Story Map!

Alaska National Parks: Bears and Wolves

Defend Against Extreme Mismanagement: The State of Alaska has for many years sanctioned highly problematic hunting practices to reduce wildlife populations including bears and wolves. NPCA helped win a ban on these practices on NPS managed national preserves in Alaska, but the Trump administration reversed that ban in 2020. Today, NPCA is working with our partners to undue the 2020 regulation and protect park wildlife.

North Cascades National Park: Grizzly Bears

Restore Keystone Species: It’s estimated that few if any grizzly bears remain in the North Cascades National Park ecosystem in Washington. NPCA’s goal is for NPS and US Fish and Wildlife to relocate new bears to the ecosystem to restore the population. With our partners, we are actively encouraging the Biden administration to lead the way and make North Cascades grizzly recovery America’s next great wildlife recovery success story.

Rim of the Valley Expansion of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area: Mountain Lions

Safe Access to Healthy Habitat: The 150,000-acre Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area is simply not large enough to provide sufficient habitat for the mountain lions that reside there. Penned in by massive freeway systems and encroaching urban development, a recent study by the Park Service and University of California Los Angeles found that, without concerted conservation efforts, mountain lions could disappear from the park in 50 years, as inbreeding, vehicle collisions and other factors take their toll.

California Desert Park Wildlife: Tortoises and Desert Bighorn Sheep

Defend Against Mismanagement: NPCA is working with our community partners to protect at risk wildlife at Joshua Tree National Park, Mojave National Preserve, and the broader landscape on which park wildlife depend. We have won crucial protection for the endangered desert tortoise against loss of habitat from industrial energy development and are now working to ensure the Interior Department enforces those protections despite pressure from industry, and to extend similar protections to other parts of the region.

Yellowstone National Park: Pronghorn

Safe Access to Healthy Habitat: For over a decade, NPCA has led a collaborative community engagement and volunteer-driven program that brings together private landowners and public land managers to remove or alter fencing barriers so pronghorn can safely migrate throughout the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. To date, we have engaged over 1,100 volunteers and removed or altered 50 miles of fencing. This popular program has helped open historic winter range north and west of Yellowstone to pronghorn for the first time in decades resulting in improvements within the health of the herd.

Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks: Grizzly Bears

Defend Against Mismanagement: In 2017, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) from the Endangered Species List. The decision to remove protections failed to consider the best available science and could have set recovery of the population back by decades. In collaboration with our partners, NPCA successfully challenged the delisting in court. Today, NPCA is working with our partners and local community members to secure natural connectivity between the genetically isolated grizzlies of Yellowstone and Grand Teton to the population in and around Glacier National Park. This genetic connectivity is critical to the future health and recovery of Yellowstone’s iconic bears. See our Story Map!

Yellowstone National Park: Bison

Safe Access to Healthy Habitat: Every year when Yellowstone bison attempt to migrate beyond park borders to winter habitat, the herd is subject to aggressive management including being rounded up and shipped to slaughter. NPCA has been working for decades to ensure that bison are treated like other valued wildlife on the lands that surround Yellowstone. NPCA helped secure the first-ever agreement by the State of Montana to allow bison access to over 300,000 acres of public lands outside the park. We are now working with our tribal partners to ensure more disease-free Yellowstone bison are transferred to Native American cultural herds and other public lands within the National Park System rather than be shipped to slaughter.

Multiple National Parks: Colorado Wildlife Corridors

Safe Access to Healthy Habitat: From Rocky Mountain to Black Canyon of the Gunnison, national parks support hundreds of species in Colorado including elk, moose, black bear, bighorn sheep, mountain lion, bobcat, and the elusive lynx. The health of these species is directly linked to their ability to move across the landscape between protected spaces. For instance, the northeast corner of Rocky Mountain National Park alone ties into more than 100 separate elk migration routes. Fortunately, there is strong support in Colorado for wildlife corridors. In 2021, the Colorado Legislature unanimously passed the bipartisan Colorado Habitat Connectivity Senate Joint Resolution 21-021, a commitment to protect and enhance habitat connectivity. On the same day the governor issued a proclamation to officially acknowledge September 29, 2021 as “Wildlife Habitat and Connectivity Day.”

Big Thicket National Preserve: Red-cockaded Woodpecker

Restore Keystone Species: For more than a decade, NPCA has worked on-the-ground with community partners at Big Thicket to restore the native longleaf pine savannah. Through this work, volunteers have planted nearly 200,000 longleaf pine seedlings to help the park achieve their goal of restoring 30,000 acres of this critically important tree. Longleaf pine provides essential habitat for numerous threatened and endangered species such as the Red-cockaded Woodpecker and the Northern Bobwhite Quail.

Isle Royale National Park: Wolves

Restore Keystone Species: NPCA is working with partners to restore the wolf population on the island ecosystem at the remote Isle Royale National Park. Once abundant, by 2018 only two wolves remained, and the species had nearly disappeared from the island. Without wolves, the island’s moose population rapidly increased and was threatening the health of the park’s sensitive habitat.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Bear and Elk

Safe Access to Healthy Habitat: NPCA is engaged with a project to better understand how elk and black bears travel out of the park and into the Pigeon River Gorge and across the busy highway that divides the region, with the ultimate goal of establishing one or more wildlife overpasses.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Wildlife Movement

Safe Access to Healthy Habitat: To better understand and improve wildlife habitat connectivity in and around Great Smoky Mountains National Park, we are working in collaboration with scientists and partners to evaluate how species such as elk and black bear move from the park to adjacent protected lands.

National Parks Legal Defense: Park Wildlife

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is our nation’s most effective law for protecting wildlife in danger of extinction. The Trump administration attempted to weaken the application of the ESA, which guides the recovery of over 600 threatened and endangered species that depend on habitat in national parks for their survival. NPCA with our partners filed multiple lawsuits challenging this weaking of the ESA. Learn more about how national parks and the ESA support each other – a win-win for parks and wildlife.

Park Wildlife Policy

Independent of the government and nonpartisan, NPCA engages decision-makers and park lovers including our more than 1.6 million members and supporters to secure a better future for park wildlife.

Big Cypress National Preserve + Everglades National Park: Florida Panther

Restore Keystone Species: It is estimated that only 120-230 federally protected Florida panthers remain in the wild. Threats from development-driven habitat loss, vehicle collisions, a recent mysterious disease, climate change, and oil exploration are jeopardizing the survival of this iconic species, Florida’s official state animal.

Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve: Florida Bonneted Bat

Restore Keystone Species: The endangered Florida Bonneted Bat is found nowhere else in the world outside of southern Florida. NPCA is actively leading work to protect the bonneted bat from the impacts of proposed oil development within Big Cypress National Preserve.

Multiple Park Units: Florida Wildlife Corridor

Safe Access to Healthy Habitat: The Florida Wildlife Corridor is a bold vision for preserving and connecting 17.9 million acres of conservation lands. The project identifies pathways of ecological connectivity that could be collaboratively conserved between existing and potentially new protected areas crisscrossing Florida, including Everglades National Park, all the way to the panhandle and Gulf Islands National Seashore, and the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.

Acadia National Park: Atlantic Salmon

Defend Against Mismanagement: Acadia National Park is an archipelago of islands and unique coastal and terrestrial habitats where flora and fauna thrive. Surrounding Acadia is Frenchman Bay, which supports abundant marine life and coastal towns that are home to generations of mariners whose livelihoods depend on the health of the bay.

Katmai and Lake Clark National Parks: Brown Bear

Protecting the Bears of Alaska’s Bear Coast: Katmai and Lake Clark National Parks host the densest population of brown bears in the world. Fattening annually on salmon, these huge bears are the keystone predator in this remarkable ecosystem. NPCA is working with our partners to protect park bears from two proposed gold and copper mines in the region, offshore oil and gas spills, overhunting, and visitor impacts.  

Click here to see  Katmai’s famous bears fishing  (during salmon season)  

Photo | Thomas D. Mangelsen  www.mangelsen.com  

Gates of the Arctic National Preserve: Caribou

Defend Against Mismanagement: The Western Arctic Caribou Herd in Northwest Alaska which migrates annually in and around Gates of the Arctic National Park is a natural wonder of the world. Over 250,000 caribou travel 2,700 miles on one of longest annual land migrations on earth. Caribou are vital to these tundra and taiga ecosystems as well as to many of the people who call the region home.   Learn more from our Story Map!   

Now, a proposed  210-mile industrial access road  and mining district threaten caribou migration routes and the 20 million-acre roadless national parks landscape in the area. Learn how  NPCA and community partners  are working to halt this development that would harm caribou, Gates of the Arctic, and the communities that depend on caribou for food.

Photo| Caribou |Kristin Gates and Jeremy La Zelle 

Alaska National Parks: Bears and Wolves

Defend Against Extreme Mismanagement: The State of Alaska has for many years sanctioned highly problematic hunting practices to reduce wildlife populations including bears and wolves. NPCA helped win a ban on these practices on NPS managed national preserves in Alaska, but the Trump administration reversed that ban in 2020. Today, NPCA is working with our partners to undue the 2020 regulation and protect park wildlife.  

Click here to visit our  story map  to learn more about NPCA's work to protect bears and wolves from  extreme hunting methods  in Alaska. 

North Cascades National Park: Grizzly Bears

Restore Keystone Species: It’s estimated that few if any grizzly bears remain in the North Cascades National Park ecosystem in Washington. NPCA’s goal is for NPS and US Fish and Wildlife to relocate new bears to the ecosystem to restore the population. With our partners, we are actively encouraging the Biden administration to lead the way and make North Cascades grizzly recovery America’s next great wildlife recovery success story.  

NPCA recognizes that recovering a grizzly bear population and living near grizzlies is no easy task. That’s why, in addition to actively encouraging their restoration, we helped establish the  Friends of North Cascades Grizzly Bear Coalition , a group of more than 30 organizations, businesses, and tribes who support the reintroduction of grizzlies to the North Cascades.  

 Visit this Story Map  to learn more about NPCA's work on grizzly bear recovery in North Cascades.  

Click here for a  video following grizzly bear recovery in Montana’s Cabinet Mountains . Grizzly recovery in the Cabinet Mountains, done through science and community involvement, could serve as a model for the North Cascades.  

Photo is of a grizzly bear recently seen on a game camera just north of the Washington Canadian border. 

Rim of the Valley Expansion of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area: Mountain Lions

Safe Access to Healthy Habitat: The 150,000-acre Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area is simply not large enough to provide sufficient habitat for the mountain lions that reside there. Penned in by massive freeway systems and encroaching urban development, a recent study by the Park Service and University of California Los Angeles found that, without concerted conservation efforts, mountain lions could disappear from the park in 50 years, as inbreeding, vehicle collisions and other factors take their toll.  

Since 2014, NPCA has been advocating for a park expansion, known as Rim of the Valley. This expansion would more than double the size of the park and protect and restore surrounding landscapes, including critical wildlife corridors, endangered watersheds and some of the last areas of native habitat in the region. The expansion would also better connect the park to other natural areas, such as the Angeles and Los Padres National Forests, providing wildlife access to millions of acres of habitat.  See our Story Map!  

Learn more about these big, urban cats in a recent  NPCA blog post .

 Photo | Larry W. Richardson 

California Desert Park Wildlife: Tortoises and Desert Bighorn Sheep 

Defend Against Mismanagement: NPCA is working with our community partners to protect at risk wildlife at Joshua Tree National Park, Mojave National Preserve, and the broader landscape on which park wildlife depend. We have won crucial protection for the endangered desert tortoise against loss of habitat from industrial energy development and are now working to ensure the Interior Department enforces those protections despite pressure from industry, and to extend similar protections to other parts of the region. 

NPCA is also working to ensure habitat connectivity between parks and adjacent lands remain intact for desert bighorn sheep. Specifically, we are advocating for three wildlife overpasses to be built into project design for a new high-speed rail project adjacent to Mojave National Preserve that will link Los Angeles and Las Vegas.   

Photos | © National Park Service 

Yellowstone National Park: Pronghorn

Safe Access to Healthy Habitat: For over a decade, NPCA has led a collaborative community engagement and volunteer-driven program that brings together private landowners and public land managers to remove or alter fencing barriers so pronghorn can safely migrate throughout the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. To date, we have engaged over 1,100 volunteers and removed or altered 50 miles of fencing. This popular program has helped open historic winter range north and west of Yellowstone to pronghorn for the first time in decades resulting in improvements within the health of the herd.   

 

To learn more about NPCA's work with pronghorn around Yellowstone, visit our  Story Map watch  a video of our staff and volunteers in action , and check out NPCA’s webpage focused on  our work to save pronghorn .

Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks: Grizzly Bears

Defend Against Mismanagement: In 2017, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) from the Endangered Species List. The decision to remove protections failed to consider the best available science and could have set recovery of the population back by decades. In collaboration with our partners, NPCA successfully challenged the delisting in court. Today, NPCA is working with our partners and local community members to secure natural connectivity between the genetically isolated grizzlies of Yellowstone and Grand Teton to the population in and around Glacier National Park. This genetic connectivity is critical to the future health and recovery of Yellowstone’s iconic bears.   See our Story Map!  

Click here for more information on  NPCA's work with grizzlies in the Rockies 

Yellowstone National Park: Bison

Safe Access to Healthy Habitat: Every year when Yellowstone bison attempt to migrate beyond park borders to winter habitat, the herd is subject to aggressive management including being rounded up and shipped to slaughter. NPCA has been working for decades to ensure that bison are treated like other valued wildlife on the lands that surround Yellowstone. NPCA helped secure the first-ever agreement by the State of Montana to allow bison access to over 300,000 acres of public lands outside the park. We are now working with our tribal partners to ensure more disease-free Yellowstone bison are transferred to Native American cultural herds and other public lands within the National Park System rather than be shipped to slaughter. 

Click  here  or visit our  story map  for more information on our work with bison in Yellowstone   

Photo | © Mike Boyd/Dreamstime.com 

Multiple National Parks: Colorado Wildlife Corridors 

Safe Access to Healthy Habitat: From Rocky Mountain to Black Canyon of the Gunnison, national parks support hundreds of species in Colorado including elk, moose, black bear, bighorn sheep, mountain lion, bobcat, and the elusive lynx. The health of these species is directly linked to their ability to move across the landscape between protected spaces. For instance, the northeast corner of Rocky Mountain National Park alone ties into more than 100 separate elk migration routes. Fortunately, there is strong support in Colorado for wildlife corridors. In 2021, the Colorado Legislature unanimously passed the bipartisan  Colorado Habitat Connectivity Senate Joint Resolution 21-021 , a commitment to protect and enhance habitat connectivity. On the same day the governor issued a  proclamation  to officially acknowledge September 29, 2021 as “Wildlife Habitat and Connectivity Day.”

NPCA and other conservation partners are working to protect and restore wildlife corridors across the landscape, especially from the threats and impacts of oil and gas development.  

Photo | USFWS

Big Thicket National Preserve: Red-cockaded Woodpecker 

Restore Keystone Species: For more than a decade, NPCA has worked on-the-ground with community partners at Big Thicket to restore the native longleaf pine savannah. Through this work, volunteers have planted nearly 200,000 longleaf pine seedlings to help the park achieve their goal of restoring 30,000 acres of this critically important tree. Longleaf pine provides essential habitat for numerous threatened and endangered species such as the Red-cockaded Woodpecker and the Northern Bobwhite Quail.   

NPCA is now working alongside the Park Service and community partners to support the process to bring Red-cockaded Woodpeckers back to the park for the first time since its disappearance in the 1990’s. 

Learn more about how our  staff and volunteers  are working to restore the habitat red-cockaded woodpeckers need to survive. 

Photo | Martjan Lammertink | U.S. Forest Service. 

Isle Royale National Park: Wolves

Restore Keystone Species: NPCA is working with partners to restore the wolf population on the island ecosystem at the remote Isle Royale National Park. Once abundant, by 2018 only two wolves remained, and the species had nearly disappeared from the island. Without wolves, the island’s moose population rapidly increased and was threatening the health of the park’s sensitive habitat.  

NPCA advocated for the Park Service to bring new wolves to the island to restore the population and bring balance back to this fragile ecosystem. Since 2018, the Park Service has reintroduced a dozen new wolves to the park from other regional populations. The wolves have begun to raise litters and are already starting to reduce the size of the moose population, restoring balance to the ecosystem. The Park Service is continuing to monitor their progress and may bring more wolves in the future.   

Visit this  page  to learn more about this restoration program and NPCA's work with wolves at Isle Royale. 

Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Bear and Elk

Safe Access to Healthy Habitat: NPCA is engaged with a project to better understand how elk and black bears travel out of the park and into the Pigeon River Gorge and across the busy highway that divides the region, with the ultimate goal of establishing one or more wildlife overpasses. 

 Visit this Story Map  to learn more about NPCA's work with elk and black bear around Great Smoky Mountains National Park. 

Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Wildlife Movement

Safe Access to Healthy Habitat: To better understand and improve wildlife habitat connectivity in and around Great Smoky Mountains National Park, we are working in collaboration with scientists and partners to evaluate how species such as elk and black bear move from the park to adjacent protected lands.  

With regional highways acting as a major barrier to park wildlife movement, reducing habitat connectivity, and increasing mortality for park species, NPCA and partners are now working to improve wildlife’s ability to safely cross the heavily trafficked 28-mile stretch of I-40 in the Pigeon River Gorge by improving the functionality of existing wildlife crossings and identifying locations for new wildlife crossing structures. 

 Visit this Story Map  to learn more about NPCA's work to increase safe passage of wildlife throughout the region. 

Click here to learn about the global significance of the Southern Appalachians relating to future animal movement and climate change:  Migrations in Motion  (The Nature Conservancy).

National Parks Legal Defense: Park Wildlife   

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is our nation’s most effective law for protecting wildlife in danger of extinction. The Trump administration attempted to weaken the application of the ESA, which guides the recovery of over 600 threatened and endangered species that depend on  habitat in national parks  for their survival. NPCA with our partners filed multiple lawsuits challenging this weaking of the ESA.  Learn more about how national parks and the ESA support each other –  a win-win for parks and wildlife.  

NPCA also works to defend individual species through the courts. For example, with our partners we are challenging the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to prematurely remove ESA protection for gray wolves in the lower 48 states. The species is just beginning the long path to recovery in park ecosystems in California, Oregon, Washington, and Colorado.   

Photo| Shenandoah Salamander | John Cancalosi Alamy 

Park Wildlife Policy 

Independent of the government and nonpartisan, NPCA engages decision-makers and park lovers including our more than 1.6 million members and supporters to secure a better future for park wildlife.  

As park wildlife continues to face a barrage of pressures from habitat destruction and fragmentation to climate change, NPCA works in Washington, D.C. and throughout the country with diverse partners to restore, fund, and defend the Endangered Species Act, to advocate for funding and policy to protect wildlife movement and migration corridors, and to defend park wildlife against problematic policy proposals. With an eye towards the growing impacts of climate change and the biodiversity crisis on parks and park wildlife, we are working to secure new, stronger laws and policies and innovative partnerships to safeguard park landscapes for wildlife.  

Photo | J Burrell Wildlife Conservation Society

 Big Cypress National Preserve + Everglades National Park: Florida Panther 

Restore Keystone Species: It is estimated that only 120-230 federally protected Florida panthers remain in the wild. Threats from development-driven habitat loss, vehicle collisions, a recent mysterious disease, climate change, and oil exploration are jeopardizing the survival of this iconic species, Florida’s official state animal.  

NPCA and our partners are leading efforts to protect the last remaining intact areas of prime panther habitat, Big Cypress National Preserve, from potentially irreversible damage from proposed new industrial oil access roads and well pads. NPCA is also advocating for maintaining essential Endangered Species Act protections for the panther.      

Learn more about NPCA’s work to  protect Big Cypress from Big Oil  and how the Florida Panther was  almost lost.  

Photo | Larry W. Richardson 

Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve: Florida Bonneted Bat

Restore Keystone Species: The endangered Florida Bonneted Bat is found nowhere else in the world outside of southern Florida. NPCA is actively leading work to protect the bonneted bat from the impacts of proposed oil development within Big Cypress National Preserve.  

Simultaneously, NPCA is advocating for more habitat to be protected for this rarest of bat species, calling on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect appropriate habitat including the entirety of Big Cypress National Preserve and important portions of the Greater Everglades ecosystem. NPCA is also closely partnering with Bat Conservation International to bring a successful long-term acoustic monitoring program into south Florida’s national parks for the first time to help bolster knowledge of bat populations and movement. Hear more from NPCA staff about protecting this rare species  Protecting Biodiversity Beyond Park Boundaries (vimeo.com)    

Photo | Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission 

Multiple Park Units: Florida Wildlife Corridor

Safe Access to Healthy Habitat: The Florida Wildlife Corridor is a bold vision for preserving and connecting 17.9 million acres of conservation lands. The project identifies pathways of ecological connectivity that could be collaboratively conserved between existing and potentially new protected areas crisscrossing Florida, including Everglades National Park, all the way to the panhandle and Gulf Islands National Seashore, and the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.

The Corridor would provide sweeping benefits for wide-ranging species, like the endangered Florida Panther. Successful implementation of the Florida Wildlife Corridor will require extensive state and federal investment, public-private collaboration, private landowner support, and sustained engagement by the conservation community. NPCA will engage-in and support this ambitious conservation vision. 

Photo | Florida Wildlife Corridor 

Acadia National Park: Atlantic Salmon 

Defend Against Mismanagement: Acadia National Park is an archipelago of islands and unique coastal and terrestrial habitats where flora and fauna thrive. Surrounding Acadia is Frenchman Bay, which supports abundant marine life and coastal towns that are home to generations of mariners whose livelihoods depend on the health of the bay. 

Now, international developers have proposed building a massive salmon farm in Frenchman Bay, just 2,000 feet from Acadia’s border. If built, the industrial farm - producing over 66 million pounds of Atlantic salmon per year - could degrade water quality, spread fish disease, lead to harmful algal blooms, and impact wildlife populations. NPCA is partnering with a growing coalition of area residents, small business owners, lobster- and fishermen and women, to oppose the salmon farm and protect Acadia for future generations. 

 Click here for more information  about the salmon farm proposal. 

Photo | Jon Arnold Images Ltd | Alamy Stock Photo