Three national parks in Washington are getting money for restoring whitebark pine trees as part of a nationwide investment in strengthening climate resilience in national parks.
The U.S. Department of the Interior announced in a news release Tuesday that more than $44 million would be doled out to National Park Service sites across the country for a wide variety of projects, including restoring redwood forests in California, helping birds in Hawaii and removing invasive grass in Arizona.
A total of $750,000 will be split between Montana, Wyoming, California and Washington to restore whitebark pine trees. Washington's Olympic, Mount Rainier and North Cascades national parks will get some of the money.
Whitebark pines are found at high elevations. They are "slow-growing, long-lived tree with a lifespan between 500 years and 1,000 years," according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Cones produced by the trees are important food sources for some animals.
The tree species was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 2022. In a news release announcing the listing, the Fish and Wildlife Service cites white pine blister rust as the primary threat to the trees along with mountain pine beetles, new wildfire patterns and climate change.
That release said that scientists estimated in 2016 that more than half of all standing whitebark pines were dead.
Tuesday's announcement said the investment in restoring whitebark pine would cover more than 300,000 acres and builds on long-term work done at Glacier, Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks in Montana and Wyoming.
Those three parks will also get some of the cash, as will Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks in California.
