WEST GLACIER — Glacier National Park will receive over $1.9M in funding from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to continue work on several projects.
Park officials state in a news release that they continue "to actively support the Blackfeet-led vision to establish a free-ranging bison herd in Northwest Montana." The herd is expected to roam freely onto NPS lands.
A total of $1.5 million of IRA funding will help with coordinating landscape-level ecosystem function and connectivity studies.
NPS is also assessing infrastructure needs and placement to support visitor use, enjoyment, and safety.
Glacier National Park was also awarded $200,514 as part of a multi-park project to inventory cultural resources in the Intermountain West high-elevation areas impacted by climate change.
Other parks awarded additional funding include Yellowstone and Grand Teton.
More than 11,000 years of human occupation and Native American cultural heritage have been documented in Glacier National Park.
However, the resources are experiencing loss through climate change-driven impacts such as wildfire and melting ice.
Two areas of research include sites associated with melting stable ice, and sites on high-elevation landforms in non-ice context (e.g., mountain passes and peaks.)
Finally, Glacier National Park received $270,000 to restore threatened whitebark pine and implement the National Whitebark Pine Restoration Strategy.
This is also a multi-park project that includes additional funding awarded to Yosemite, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Olympic, Mount Rainer, North Cascades, Grand Teton, and Yellowstone national parks, totaling $750,000.
The project includes working with partners and tribes to plant blister rust-resistant seed and seedlings, identify rust-resistant trees, monitor seedling survival, and identify climate refugia.
The release notes that the project builds on 20 years of work at Glacier National Park and within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
Glacier National Park’s climate-related projects are part of an overall $195 million investment from the Inflation Reduction Act announced last week to prepare parks across the country to be resilient to climate change.
“Glacier is on a lot of people’s minds when thinking about the impacts of a changing climate,” says Glacier National Park Superintendent Dave Roemer. “These projects will help us prepare, restore, and preserve key aspects of the park that make Glacier special. What ties these efforts together is the development and use of high-quality information to inform management, and the coordination of these efforts with the Blackfeet Nation and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.”
Through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, the Department of the Interior is implementing more than $2 billion in overall investments to restore our nation’s lands and waters, guided by a new restoration and resilience framework to support coordination across agency restoration and resilience programs and drive transformational outcomes.
For additional information about IRA projects nationwide, visit the NPS IRA webpage.
