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Park Overview It's more than a mountain. Denali National Park & Preserve features North America's highest mountain, 20,320-foot tall Mount McKinley. The Alaska Range also includes countless other spectacular mountains and many large glaciers. Denali's more than 6 million acres also encompass a complete sub-arctic eco-system with large mammals such as grizzly bears, wolves, Dall sheep, and moose. The park was established as Mt. McKinley National Park on Feb. 26, 1917. The original park was designated a wilderness area and incorporated into Denali National Park and Preserve in 1980. The Park was designated an international biosphere reserve in 1976. Today the park accommodates a wide variety of visitor use including wildlife viewing, mountaineering, and backpacking. It continues to provide a laboratory for research in the natural sciences. Denali National Park
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The National Park Service and the National Biological Service initiated research in Denali National Park and Preserve to develop ecological monitoring protocols for national parks in the Arctic/Subarctic biogeographic areas. Research at Rock Creek, a headwater stream, has used a watershed approach to assess the hydrological cycle, hypotheses of global climate change, and biological interactions of organisms occuping intermediate, but poorly studied, positions in Alaskan food webs. The field approach includes hydrological and depositional considerations and a suite of integrated measures linking key aquatic and terrestrial biota, environmental variables, or defined ecological processes, in order to establish ecological conditions and detect, track, and understand mechanisms of environmental change. The sampling activities include corresponding measures of physical, chemical, and biological attributes in four Rock Creek habitats believed characteristic of the greater system diversity of Denali. |
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