Killarney, Glacier and the emerging importance of sister national parks

The pandemic prompted record numbers of people to get out and visit national parks around the world. In the first five months of 2021, Glacier National Park in western Montana in the US saw a 17 per cent rise in visitors and was even forced to introduce a ticketing system. On the opposite side of the Atlantic Sea, a similar story played out in Killarney National Park.

It was these and other experiences that prompted Glacier National Park to pen a major partnership agreement with Killarney in March 2021 making the two entities become “sister parks”.

“The collaborative nature of this partnership provides an excellent opportunity to exchange lessons learned related to recreation, preservation and resource management,” said Shawn Benge, deputy director of the US National Park Service, an agency that employs around 20,000 people across 85 million acres.

With sister park agreements becoming increasingly popular – and vital – parks in countries around the world are teaming up to share research resources and expertise, and to manage new challenges.

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For Killarney National Park, help in dealing with new, climate change-related threats such as the wildfires that flared last year – is now a major priority. For several days in late April 2021, a fire raged scorching between 2,500 and 3,000 acres – close to one-third of the park’s total land area.

In the immediate aftermath, officials from Killarney and Glacier national parks worked together to map satellite imagery and conduct surveys of the damage.

“At the time of the fire, they (Glacier) gave us a lot of help,” says Philip Buckley, divisional manager at the National Parks & Wildlife Service (NPWS). “In terms of the immediate response, [that was] mapping the extent and the intensity of the fire. They shared several different fire plans they had.”

Buckley says the broader experience Glacier National Park has in dealing with fire management – prescribed burns, for example – was also helpful. “While we have been through [fire management] to some extent, [Glacier] have had a very systematic approach to it.”

Staffing changes, including Glacier getting a new park supervisor, Dave Roemer, this month, had meant opportunities for close collaboration between the two parks has been slowed recently. But officials in Glacier expect that to change.

“[Dave] has started to review the language in the agreement and looks forward to establishing a relationship with the staff at Killarney,” says Gina Kerzman, public affairs officer at Glacier National Park. “We still need to work out the specifics of what the two parks hope to accomplish through this agreement.”

At almost the size of Co Kerry and with elevations ranging between 1,000 and 2,000 metres on both sides of the US continental divide, Glacier National Park is unsurprisingly home to a vast range of species and topographies.

It boasts more than one thousand kilometres of trails set across unadulterated mountain wilderness, making it one of America’s top outdoor recreation sites. It is also a cornerstone conservation ecosystem that is home to animals as varied as snowshoe hares, grizzly bears and ground squirrels.

With the pandemic fuelling unprecedented interest in the outdoors over the past two years, one of the biggest challenges sites such as it, Killarney and others are facing centres on how to best manage huge numbers of visitors in a way that is sustainable – without taking away from the experience.

To manage that, Glacier and a host of other national parks in the US have been enforcing a vehicle registration system for people wishing to visit, to control traffic volumes.

Currently, 69 parks in 33 countries such as Nepal, Poland and elsewhere enjoy sister status with US national parks. Partnerships are oftentimes being forged as much out of necessity – teaming up to exchange expertise to battle invasive species, manage heavy traffic and climate change-related issues – as out of convenience.

Sometimes sister park relationships have been built to foster intergenerational collaboration with a view to preserving and promoting wilderness areas in the decades to come. Take, for example, a team of secondary school students from Costa Rica that visited the Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado for a citizen science research project. That collaboration, held in 2014, involved students as young as 14-years-old studying migratory birds and mountain lions – specifies common to both Costa Rica and Colorado. Both Rocky Mountain National Park and the students’ home park – the Santa Elana Cloud Forest Reserve – lie along the Continental Divide of the Americas.

Other parks pursue sister relationships for more practical reasons. The Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park is tied with parks in South Korea and China that are also home to active volcanoes, lava tubes and unique and endangered plants.

For those behind the burgeoning Killarney-Glacier relationship, combating and managing fires is just one aspect under discussion. Authorities in Killarney are in the process of establishing a new biodiversity review of the park, and have asked a representative of Glacier National Park, among others, to sit on its ad hoc scientific committee and to input on the review.

“Having the perspective of Glacier will be very important, to see and include their ideas,” says Buckley. “We definitely need to see other people’s perspectives outside of Ireland and outside of the EU in terms of how they deal with nature conservation. We certainly benefit from that.

“There may be different ecology, different ecosystems and geographic areas, but a lot of the issues facing Glacier National Park would mirror what we have here in Killarney – and vice versa,” Buckley adds. “There’s a lot of practical information we can exchange.”

A UNESCO Biosphere Reserve since 1981, Killarney National Park is one of the most spectacular outdoor public spaces in Europe. Within walking distance of bustling Killarney, visitors to “Ireland’s version of Grand Teton” – a reference to the famed national park in Montana’s neighbouring state of Wyoming, come for the mountains, lakes, woods, gardens, waterfalls and kilometres of hiking trails all in one location. It is also home to white-tailed sea eagles and the only pre-Ice Age red deer population in Ireland. During the fall rut season, visitors get to see up close arguably Ireland’s most iconic species.

Today, however, the post-pandemic world is throwing up new parameters for national parks. Across the Atlantic, national parks have, in recent weeks and months, been reporting a decline in visitors in part due to record petrol prices that have risen as much as five times higher than during the early days of the pandemic.

Visitor numbers to Glacier National Park fell 22 per cent between April 2021 and April this year. The iconic Yellowstone National Park saw vehicle entry numbers fall 34 per cent over the May Memorial Day holiday weekend compared to last year.

With similar cost of living issues also taking hold in Ireland, this ever-changing set of realities for parks and their managers highlights the importance of strengthening ties.

To that end, the next step, says Buckley, is to arrange an in-person visit either in Killarney or Montana. “We hope that by the end of the year we can do that,” he says. “You will learn a phenomenal amount when you go to a place like that, no more than they would when they come here.”