Our national parks are wild yet carefully managed places. Located in every province and territory of Canada, they offer a breath-taking diversity of geology, landforms, vegetation, and wildlife. They cover over 250,000 square kilometers — about two percent of this country’s vast land mass — but together they offer a representative, and

forever protected, sample of Canada’s distinct natural ecozones.

Canada’s National Park System now includes 41 National Parks and National Reserves. The oldest, Banff, in Alberta, was first established in 1885 on a mere 26 square kilometres. By 1887, it had grown to a 405 square kilometre area set aside as a “public park and pleasure ground for the benefit, advantage, and enjoyment of the people of Canada.” Today, Banff covers almost 7000 square kilometres, and, like all of our National Parks, it offers visitors a wealth of natural wonders.

Animals like the grizzly bear, caribou, muskox, Pacific giant salamander, and golden eagle thrive in these parks, as do hundreds of Canada’s estimated 3300 native plant species such as the ground-hugging cinquefoil, saxifrage, and potentilla, resilient wildflowers that carpet the tundra floor in a rainbow of colours during the short Arctic summer. Commonly referred to as biodiversity (short for

biological diversity), this abundance of animal and plant life in the national parks is not only a gift of nature. It is also the result of decades of careful management of ecosystems. These systems are made up of the communities of species that interact with each other within particular physical environments such as the lush rainforest of the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, in British Columbia, and the towering fjords of Newfoundland’s Gros Morne National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Wardens carry out many of the responsibilities for ecosystem management in our National Parks. Trained to maintain and, if necessary, restore, the ecological integrity of the parks, these individuals ensure that the ecosystems remain healthy and whole in the face of local and outside threats. These threats can take the form of invading non-native species, drifting airborne pollutants, unplanned fires, and sheer human overuse, as thousands of