Gabe Sidman

My internship was done last summer at Gettysburg National Military Park (GNMP) in Gettysburg , Pennsylvania. GNMP is a unit of the National Park Service (NPS), which is the branch of the Federal Government (within the Department of the Interior), charged with protecting nationally significant natural and cultural areas in the United States for the enjoyment of current and future generations. Each unit must be deemed significant by Congress to be included within the NPS. GNMP gained its significance from the pivotal Civil War battle that took place around the town of Gettysburg in 1863.

The division of the park I worked for this summer was Resource Management, which oversees the management of cultural and natural resources. I worked specifically with the Natural Resource Specialist, the Forestry Technician, and the Biological Technicians, who were the only staff within the park responsible for natural resource management. I participated in a variety of projects and tasks for the park in a quite informal setting. My only major project for the summer was continuing an Eastern Box Turtle inventory for the park's woodlots. I went out into the park's woodlots, set up transects in the woodlots using rough eye estimation (which were usually 5-15 square acres), and then searched each transect for turtles, which live in forest ecosystems. When turtles were located, they were marked with a unique number, measured, weighed, photographed, and marked by location with a GPS unit. At the end of the summer, I used the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software ArcView to create maps utilizing the GPS locations of each turtle found in the park. I mapped the turtles against vegetation types and types of management action the park was taking in each woodlot. In addition to the box turtle project, I sampled water quality, completed vegetation surveys for forest health evaluations, marked park boundaries, and participated in various other small activities.

This internship did meet my original objectives for the most part. I believe the skills I learned and improved this summer will serve me well in future jobs, especially if I choose to continue with the NPS. I now know how faunal and floral inventories are conducted and how basic water quality testing is done, and I have an improved knowledge of GIS software. These are valuable skills in my field. I now have a good idea of how natural resource management is achieved within historical parks after observing and participating in the process for an entire summer. I understand one type of job that combines history and ecology— and the advantages and disadvantages that go with having to consider both disciplines in one park. The internship also helped me realize what I do not want to do as a career, and what things I do not want to have to deal with in my future jobs. Still, learning what I do not want to do has been in some ways just as valuable as learning exactly what I do want to do. I realized that natural resource management in a park that has a historical mission can be very frustrating and that at least in this type of setting, history and ecology do not harmoniously mix, but clash in many instances.

The upside of the realization that ecological preservation and historical preservation often clash is that it will make for a more interesting SIP. I identified one major issue involving the different types of preservation goals at GNMP: this was the current GNMP General Management Plan, which has the goal of returning the natural landscape of the battle to how it appeared at the start of the battle in 1863. Since the park has not been closely managed since the battle, many areas that were historically grazing fields or crop land have grown up into forest habitat. The General Management Plan calls for removal of trees in such areas in order to return them to their “historical” state. In a few other areas, trees must be planted in order to restore historically wooded areas that have since been cleared to their natural states. The issue that many environmentalists and citizens in the area have with this plan is that these woodlots slated for removal have become some of the best habitat for woodland species in the area and are in many cases very biologically diverse areas (containing, for example, one area with a very high density of box turtles).

Others (including the park's public statements) say that the removal of trees will provide native grassland habitat, which is becoming increasingly rare in the eastern United States . This is seen as an ecological advantage— a way in which historical and ecological preservation can both be done in the same place at the same time.

This example of controversy involving both ecological and historical preservation will help me with my SIP and make it more interesting. In my project, I will highlight the ways in which parks accomplish both types of preservation simultaneously, and the difficulties that arise in balancing the two. I will utilize two parks as case studies: one being GNMP, which has a historical mission but still has many natural resources to protect, and the other will be Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor , Maine . Acadia is primarily an ecological park, but has historical resources that it protects. Hopefully I can obtain enough information from Acadia and perhaps other parks in the coming semester to make an interesting comparison to the vast knowledge I now have of Gettysburg .