Random National Park Generator

How this random national park generator works

Press Generate and you get a national park and its country. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them.

Banff. Serengeti. Kruger. Torres del Paine. Fiordland. Galápagos. Yosemite. Yellowstone.

Every one of them is a line somebody drew on a map. That turns out to be a much more radical act, and a much more fragile one, than it sounds.

Draw a line, and inside the line, leave things alone

In 1872 the United States Congress set aside a piece of Wyoming and called it a national park. Several countries had older protected areas that were not called that at the time, but Yellowstone is close enough to a new idea that most histories treat it as the first.

The idea was simple and radical. Draw a line. Inside the line, leave things alone.

Nobody had quite done that before. Land had been protected because a king wanted the deer, or a monastery wanted the peace. Yellowstone was protected because of what it was, on behalf of nobody in particular, in perpetuity.

The trouble with the idea took a century to show up. And it is not the trouble you would guess. Nobody broke the line. The line held. That was the problem.

A park is a line on a map, and the animals cannot read it

Here is the problem, stated as plainly as it can be.

A national park is a boundary. Inside it, habitat. Outside it, increasingly, farms and roads and towns and fences. Over decades, the land outside changes and the land inside does not, and the park slowly stops being a piece of a large wild landscape and becomes something else: an island, surrounded not by water but by everything else we do.

Ecologists know what happens to islands. Take a hilltop, flood the valleys around it, and the new island starts with more species than an island that size can hold. Some die out. Nothing arrives to replace them, because there is water in the way. The species count falls until it settles at whatever the island can support. Smaller islands settle lower. More isolated islands settle lower still.

The islands made by rising sea levels are called land-bridge islands. The question somebody eventually asked was whether a national park behaves like one.

What happened when somebody checked

In January 1987, Nature published a short paper by the biologist William Newmark. He had gone through the records of fourteen national parks in the western United States and Canada and worked out which mammal species had been present when each park was established, and which were present now.

The land-bridge island hypothesis makes three predictions. Within a park, losses should outnumber arrivals. The number of losses should go down as the park gets bigger. And the number of losses should go up the longer the park has existed.

All three held.

Newmark's conclusion is one of the bluntest sentences in conservation biology: all but the largest of these parks are too small to hold on to a complete mammal community. Not too small in some distant future. Too small already, and quietly losing species, decades after somebody drew a line around them and declared them saved.

The parks did not fail. The parks are doing exactly what a park does. The line simply is not big enough, and it never was, because it was drawn around scenery rather than around ecosystems. Yellowstone was drawn around geysers.

Bigger, and joined up

If isolation is the problem, connection is the answer, and this is now the mainstream of conservation planning.

A 2022 paper in Scientific Reports ran the arithmetic for two hypothetical networks of western North American parks: Yellowstone linked to Glacier, and Mount Rainier linked to North Cascades. Removing the barriers between them, and folding in adjacent wilderness and the routes that migrating animals already use, would enlarge the effective habitat enormously and cut the rate at which mammal species disappear.

Not by making the parks bigger. By letting them stop being islands.

It is a hard thing to picture, because a park is exactly the sort of object we file separately. Yellowstone is one place and Glacier is another. Each has its own gate, its own map, its own name. The research argues that the gates are the problem, and that thinking of them as four parks rather than two corridors is itself part of what is emptying them.

What counts as a national park

Whatever a national government says counts.

"National park" is a label each country applies by its own law, which is why the phrase covers a Wyoming plateau, a Tanzanian plain, a Chilean glacier field and a Malaysian rainforest without meaning quite the same thing in any two of them. Some are wilderness. Some contain towns. Some permit hunting, grazing or mining.

The international system that tries to make the labels comparable is the IUCN's set of protected-area categories, which sorts protected land by how it is managed rather than by what it is called. Category II is the one named after national parks. A great many places called national parks do not sit in it, and a great many places that do sit in it are called something else: game reserve, provincial park, marine park, fauna reserve, state park.

So the sign at the gate tells you which parliament passed which act. It does not tell you what is inside.

Ways people actually use this

• Trip planning. There are hundreds, and you can name maybe twelve.
• Quizzes. Show the park, ask for the country, then ask what lives in it that would not survive the park being half the size.
• Teaching island biogeography. Generate two parks, one huge and one small, and ask which has lost more mammals. The answer is knowable in advance.
• Worldbuilding. A protected area implies an unprotected area, a boundary, and somebody paid to patrol it.
• Reading the label. Look up the IUCN category of the next park you visit. It rarely matches the sign.

Getting more out of the filters

• Every entry ends with the country in brackets, so Contains works as a country filter. Try USA, Chile, Canada, Australia.
• Ends with ignores the country in brackets and reads the last letter of the park's own name, so k catches everything ending in the word "Park".
• Type Reserve, Marine or Provincial to pull out the places whose governments chose a different word.
• Type National Park and then look at what is left over. That difference is the subject of the section above.

Questions people ask

What was the first national park?

Yellowstone, established by the United States Congress in 1872, is the one usually given the title. Several countries have older protected areas that were not called national parks at the time.

Why are national parks compared to islands?

Because as the land around them is developed, they become patches of habitat surrounded by terrain that animals cannot cross. Isolated patches lose species over time, and smaller, more isolated patches lose more.

Do national parks really lose species?

Yes. A 1987 study of fourteen western North American parks found that mammal species had been lost since each park was established, that smaller parks lost more, and that older parks lost more. The author concluded that all but the largest were too small to retain a complete mammal fauna.

What can be done about it?

Connect the parks. Corridors, wilderness buffers, protected migration routes. Modelling suggests linking existing parks into networks would slow species loss substantially without any park growing at all.

What counts as a national park?

Whatever a national government says does. The IUCN maintains international categories to make protected areas comparable, but the name on the sign is a matter of domestic law, which is why reserves, marine parks and state parks often protect more than the national park next door.

References

1. Newmark, A land-bridge island perspective on mammalian extinctions in western North American parks, Nature 325, 430 to 432
2. Newmark 1987, abstract
3. Enhanced regional connectivity between western North American national parks will increase persistence of mammal species diversity