RAPID/Collaborative Research: The 2022 Yellowstone Flood: Evaluating National Parks as Critical Infrastructures to the US Ecotourism Economy

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Yellowstone National Park (YNP) sustains over 4 million visitors annually and generates over 8,700 jobs and greater than $830 million of benefits to the surrounding region’s economy. During June 2022, a 500-yr flood event swept across YNP and gateway communities destroying road and building infrastructures, leading to the closure of the park and the evacuation of more than 10,000 visitors. YNP remained fully closed for 9 days and subsequently reopened partially under variable entry systems; however, the northern entrances have remained closed, disconnecting gateway communities and crippling dependent economies. The economic impacts from the YNP closures on the region’s eco-tourism industry is expected to be severe in the following years. The Yellowstone flood experience runs counter to conventional disaster risk paradigms, which focus on the exposure, vulnerability, and resilience of the ‘built-up environment’, such as risks to human health, property damages, or critical infrastructures. In contrast, the Yellowstone flooding suggests that an extreme disturbance in a national park, or natural infrastructure, can induce severe and systemic economic impacts to entire regions. This suggests that natural infrastructures can operate similarly to human-built infrastructures in providing critical services for human livelihoods. Ultimately, this brings into question how society should manage and value protected land assets and extends society’s valuation of US National Parks, “America’s Best Idea”, beyond mere aesthetics to an accurate portrayal of serving critical roles in preserving our nation’s economic and public health security and safety. This Rapid Response Research (RAPID) project seeks to monitor and understand the infrastructural and economic impacts and recovery, as they rapidly unfold over the next weeks and months to understand the interdependencies between humans and natural infrastructures, particularly exposing society’s vulnerability to disasters in non-built-up areas. The objective of the work is to rapidly collect ephemeral information critical to documenting and understanding the infrastructural impacts of the YNP flooding, the rate and nature of infrastructure evolution and recovery, and the systemic economic impacts of the flooding on the ecotourism-dependent industries in the gateway communities. Comprehensive inventories of infrastructure loss, damage, and recovery will occur via direct observation and photo documentation. Through interviews and web surveillance, the impacts of the closures and re-openings on economics, regional travel, and human activities will be documented. Finally, the FEWSION for Community Resilience (F4R™) program will identify social and physical infrastructures embedded within the region’s critical supply chains and provide communities with approaches to mitigate future disaster risks.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.