Washington:

Can America’s national parks remain “unimpaired” forever, with their majestic scenery and wildlife unaltered? Global warming makes that impossible, says Wylie Carr, a climate change specialist at the National Park Service.

According to Carr, who works on environmental protection at the agency’s climate change response team, hotter temperatures are the main threat to the parks.

With some species vanishing and the natural habitats of others destroyed, park service workers sometimes have no other choice but to defy their mission as stated in a 1916 law: preserving the parks in their original state.

The Organic Act asked the National Park Service “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and… leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

But the NPS is developing innovative strategies to fulfill the goal as best they can.

Carr talked to AFP about some of those new ideas:

What is the new NPS philosophy? 

“Often, because our policies focus on maintaining historical or natural conditions, our default mode is to resist change. What the ‘Resist, Accept, Direct’ (RAD) framework helps us to do is recognize that we have to be managing for persistence, but we also have to be managing for transformation.

“And so where it’s no longer possible or feasible to resist change, then what do we do?

“The RAD framework helps us lay out the other possibilities. One is to just accept change. And a lot of times, that’s what we’re going to have to do. Because we don’t have the resources, we don’t have the ability to resist the change.

“Then when we are directing change, we’re thinking about: how would we intentionally move the system in a different direction, working with the trajectory that we’re on, to arrive at maybe a more desirable endpoint?”

Examples of ‘directed changes’? 

“That’s where we might be thinking about: are there opportunities for maybe assisting migration of species in a way that helps us to maintain key species on a landscape, even if they’re not in the same place?

“Are there ways that we could start to bring in species that are going to be better adapted to the future climate of the park, that are not invasive species? Maybe it’s a species that is a native species, but it occurs further south.

“And so when we have a big forest fire, we’re replanting with that tree species that’s going to be better adapted to hotter and drier conditions.”

Does this contradict mission to preserve? 

“Everyone in the Park Service is very committed to the Organic Act. And so it’s not that we want to manage differently, it’s that climate change is forcing us to make unavoidable choices as strategically as possible.

“I think what’s important to keep in mind is that no one wants to do things differently. We’re being forced to. And so we’re trying to do that in a thoughtful and intentional way.

“A lot of times, we are going to have to accept change, and be clear that that’s a management decision and approach that we’re taking.

“And so we’re not going to deny the impacts of climate change. It is transforming ecosystems. In a lot of cases, we’re just going to have to accept those changes.

“But we’re going to call it out and say that’s what we’re doing, and not act like we’re just going to be able to continue to resist everywhere all the time.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Researchers in the Amazon have discovered the world’s largest snake species – an enormous green anaconda – in Ecuador’s rainforest that split off from its closest relatives 10 million years ago though they still nearly look identical to this day.

A video shared online shows the scale of these 20-foot-long (6.1-meter-long) reptiles as one of the researchers, Dutch biologist Freek Vonk, swims alongside a giant 200-kilo (441-pound) specimen.

It was thought that there was only one species of green anaconda in the wild, the Eunectes murinus, but the scientific journal Diversity this month revealed that the new “northern green anaconda” belongs to a different, new species, Eunectes akiyama.

“What we were there to do was use the anacondas as an indicator species for what kind of damage is being done by the oil spills that are plaguing the Yasuni in Ecuador, because the oil extraction is absolutely out of control,” researcher Bryan G. Fry said.

Fry – an Australian professor of biology at the University of Queensland who for almost 20 years has been investigating anaconda species found in South America – told Reuters the discovery allows them to show that the two species split from each other almost 10 million years ago.

“But the really amazing part was, despite this genetic difference, and despite their long period of divergence, the two animals are completely identical,” he said.

Although green anaconda snakes are very similar visually, there is a genetic difference of 5.5%, which surprised the scientists.

“Which is an incredible amount of genetic difference, particularly when you put it in the context that we’re only 2% different from chimpanzees,” Fry said.

Anacondas are incredibly useful sources of information for the ecological health of the area and the potential impacts on human health of oil spills in the region, Fry said.

Some of the snakes they studied in parts of Ecuador were heavily polluted by oil spills, and the anacondas and arapaima fish are accumulating a large amount of the petrochemical metals, he added.

“That means that if arapaima fish are accumulating these oil spill metals, that they need to be avoided by pregnant women, just like women avoid salmon and tuna and other parts of the world for fear of methylmercury,” he said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)