National Park Service Scaling up Initiative

The National Park Service seeks to manage parks as cornerstones in protecting broader natural and cultural landscapes. As today threats, unforeseen a century ago, have emerged beyond park boundaries and demand solutions that are large in scope and require collaboration with partners.  The agency’s Scaling Up initiative promotes large landscape conservation to support healthy ecosystems and cultural resources. It recognize the need to collaborate with other land managers and partners as landscape protection strategies have changed – it is hard to create big, new protected areas, so there is a need to look for new ways to do things that are more cooperative and connected.

 An important element of this work is integrating resource stewardship for cultural and natural values. Some strategies for doing this include building on   the success of non-traditional units such as heritage areas and partnership parks, demonstrating the great diversity of the National Park System (parks and programs), and empowering local people and partners to tell their stories on a landscape scale.  As part of this work it is important to engage with other large landscape initiatives for example the Large Landscape Cooperatives and share our practices particularly in areas where the agency has special expertise such as the recognition and management of cultural landscapes.