National Park Service Partnership
National Park Service Partnership
Denali Repeat Photography Project Reveals Dramatic Changes
Denali National Park & Preserve
Note from the Editor : Mojave National Preserve is part of our national park system .
We have decided to share an article of interest from the National Park website in our magazine to help celebrate all that is out there to go and see .
By Carl A . Roland and Sarah E . Stehn Series : Alaska Park Science - Volume 12 Issue 2 : Climate Change in Alaska ’ s National parks https :// www . nps . gov / articles / aps-v12-i2-c11 . htm
Repeat photo pairs provide dramatic visual evidence of recent changes in vegetation , water bodies , and glaciers , among other elements of the landscape . While there are unique natural and cultural history vignettes revealed among this large set of photographs , such as the draining of Bergh Lake , and the burial of the Copper Mountain Cabin by river gravels , the majority of photo pairs show change patterns that appear to be operating on a larger scale .
In 2005 Denali National Park and Preserve received a donation of many hundreds of photographs taken from the backseat of a two-seater airplane by Dr . Fred Dean , emeritus professor of wildlife biology at the University of Alaska .
Figure 1a . Repeated images of Denali ’ s glaciers reveal glacial retreat - Stephen Capps and Ron Karpilo
Dr . Dean had taken these photographs in the summers of 1975-6 as part of a project to produce the first land-cover map of ( then ) Mt .
Figure 1b . Repeated images of Denali ’ s glaciers reveal glacial retreat - Stephen Capps and Ron Karpilo
McKinley National Park . This treasure trove of images and associated mapped locations documented by immaculate field notes helped launch a major effort to acquire matched sets of repeated historic / modern photo pairs as a way to observe and detect changes occurring across the park landscape : the Denali Repeat Photography project .
12 THE DESERT LIGHT | May / Jun 2018