By Alex Day, Marketing & Communications Director
From the rocky Pacific coast to glacier-capped volcanoes, Washington’s national parks feel timeless. Stand at a trailhead, and it’s easy to believe that the mountain in front of you looks like it always has, and always will.
But these landscapes are changing and evolving all the time: glaciers are retreating, rivers are reshaping their banks, spring arrives a little earlier than it used to, and wildfires leave behind scars. The work of monitoring and documenting that change over time belongs to a group of National Park Service employees most visitors never see: the North Coast and Cascades Inventory & Monitoring Network (NCCN).
NCCN is one of 32 Inventory and Monitoring networks the National Park Service runs across the country. Each network groups together parks that share similar ecosystems, so scientists can study them as a region rather than one park at a time.
NCCN spans seven park units across western Washington and northwestern Oregon, including the three national parks that Washington’s National Park Fund supports: Mount Rainier, North Cascades, and Olympic. The other four are smaller, historic sites tied to the region’s early settlement: Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve, Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, Lewis and Clark National Historical Park, and San Juan Island National Historical Park.
Together, these parks protect some of the largest remaining tracts of old growth forest in the country, with trees 500 to 1,000 years old and more than 250 feet tall. They also collectively contain more than 500 glaciers, the most of any region in the contiguous United States.
For Washington’s National Park Fund, NCCN is a little different from much of what we support. Most of our work focuses on a single park at a time. This network reaches across all three of the large parks we partner with, and several more, which makes it a rare chance to invest in the health of our entire region at once.
The network’s work falls into two connected parts.
First comes the inventory: baseline surveys of geology, soils, plants, and animals present in parks. When the NCCN was established two decades ago, scientists gathered this information about key park resources, building species lists and creating vegetation, soil, and geologic maps. These inventories have become important reference points (and provided the foundational information to design the monitoring programs that followed).
Then comes the monitoring. The network tracks a set of physical, chemical, and biological indicators it calls vital signs (similar to how a doctor tracks a patient’s pulse and temperature over time). Those vital signs range from glaciers and mountain lakes to landbirds, climate, intertidal life, and water quality. By measuring the same things in the same way year after year, scientists can tell the difference between a normal fluctuation and a real, lasting shift.
Glaciers show why the network approach matters. NCCN monitors glaciers at Mount Rainier, North Cascades, and Olympic National Parks, and comparing the three tells a richer story than any one park could alone. Olympic’s glaciers sit at lower elevations, which leaves them more exposed to warming temperatures. Mount Rainier’s higher peaks act as something of a high-elevation refuge, and yet they, too, are losing ice.
Only by looking across parks can researchers see that regional pattern clearly.
Long-term, standardized data collection helps us spot problems early and understand what’s driving change. The network’s data also provides a reference point to which monitoring data from outside park boundaries — and future park data — can be compared. The network shares what it learns with managers, scientists, and the public.
That last piece, communicating the science, is especially important. Mount Rainier, North Cascades, and Olympic National Parks welcome more than five million visitors each year, and when those visitors are able to not just see but understand the landscapes around them — and how they’re changing over time — they walk away inspired to help preserve wild spaces.
At Washington’s National Park Fund, we believe ensuring parks remain home to healthy, resilient ecosystems over the long term goes hand in hand with helping people understand and connect with the science that makes it possible. One of those efforts this year was a science communication internship, for which we helped provide housing support. That’s how we met Sophia Hammerle.
Sophia is a science communication assistant with the North Coast and Cascades Research Learning Center, a small program based in Port Angeles at Olympic National Park that serves the same parks as the network. She came by way of a Scientists in Parks internship, a 12-week term spent developing communication products about the research and monitoring happening across the network.
Sophia earned a degree in narrative studies at the University of Southern California and arrived at Olympic from Los Angeles, where she had worked in environmental education and museum exhibitions. A turning point arrived during a poetry-writing course she took at a marine science lab on Catalina Island, surrounded by environmental studies students. “I realized I could combine these two interests of mine, writing in the environment,” she says. That realization pointed her towards science communication and, eventually, toward the parks.
Sophia’s internship blends time at a desk with days in the field. On the written side, she turned dense research papers into stories a general audience can follow. One of her favorites summarized a study that used automated recording units, the same tools the parks use for northern spotted owl monitoring, to listen in on nearly 30 species of birds and track whether they were shifting the timing of their breeding as spring arrives earlier.
To make it click, she reached for a comparison most people already know. “I framed it in the context of Merlin Bird ID,” the popular sound-identification app. It turns out, scientists are using a similar tool to study bird phenology. Sophia has also joined field crews, including an amphibian survey on Ross Lake in the North Cascades National Park Service Complex. She made a point of photographing the researchers themselves, recognizing that the people doing the work so rarely end up in the picture.
On the in-person side, Sophia built a hands-on table program she brought to trailheads across the network. Each one centered on a single “agent of change” in a park, such as the glaciers at Mount Rainier and the Elwha River at Olympic, paired with a matching game that asked visitors to connect a photo of fieldwork to the map or graph it produced. The design let people engage at whatever depth they wanted. “Someone might just want to look at a picture or play the game,” she says, “but if they’re really interested, then we can go deeper.”
Behind the game were three simple goals: to help visitors see a park as a changing landscape that people are part of, to show that science is how we observe and respond to that change, and to reflect on our own role in a changing landscape, at the park and back home.
Nowhere did that come together more powerfully than at the Elwha River. One afternoon, Sophia met a visitor who had wandered out to the Madison Falls trailhead on a single-day trip in Olympic, with no idea what he was looking at.
I was so excited to tell him that he was at the site of the largest dam removal, at the time, in US history. I could see it changing before his eyes.”
What had looked like a pretty river became something else entirely once he knew the story: salmon returning to nearly the full length of the watershed, sediment moving freely downstream again, and the ripple effects reaching species like the American dipper.
Ask Sophia for the one image that sums up why the work matters, and she returns to that river. The Elwha connects the mountains to the ocean, carrying snowmelt from Hurricane Ridge all the way to the sea. “The physical interconnectivity of the watershed is mirrored by the interconnectivity of the research, and our role as people,” she says. It is a place that holds the science, the history, and the culture of the peninsula in one view, including the return of the Tribes’ cultural fisheries after the dams came down
NCCN is, in the end, a long-term promise to keep watching, measuring, and understanding these landscapes so they can stay healthy and resilient for generations. That promise depends on the patient science of the monitoring crews, and on people like Sophia, who make that science something a visitor can feel standing at the edge of a river and seeing it firsthand.
Donors to Washington’s National Park Fund invest in both. Donations help sustain the research that keeps Mount Rainier, North Cascades, and Olympic National Parks thriving, and the storytelling that helps all of us understand why it matters.
Washington’s National Park Fund is the official philanthropic partner of Mount Rainier, North Cascades, and Olympic National Parks. Through donor support, we fund critical park projects that protect wildlife, preserve ecosystems, and enhance visitor experiences. Your donations help ensure these iconic landscapes remain for generations to come. Join the movement by giving back at wnpf.org/donate.
Want to explore the science behind these parks? Learn more about the North Coast and Cascades Network at nps.gov/im/nccn.
Photos courtesy of Sophia Hammerle and Hazel Galloway/NPS