Are Helicopters the Future of Conservation? - Outside Magazine
” John Knapp asks me on a recent visit to Santa Cruz Island, off the coast of southern California. Knapp is a botanist at the Nature Conservancy (TNC), the country’s largest environmental non-profit, and we are contemplating these trees not from a trail, but from 400 feet above in a three-seat Schweizer 333 helicopter with an open-air cabin. Knapp, a SoCal native in his early forties with a salt-and-paprika beard and a winning gap-toothed smile, laps up each gust of wind that blasts through the cockpit like a golden retriever leaning out of a car. Santa Cruz Island, part of Channel Islands National Park and the largest island in the archipelago, is crawling with invasive species in hard-to-reach places. The Channel Islands are sometimes called “the Galapagos Islands of North America,” due to their unusually high biodiversity, and Santa Cruz Island, Knapp says, "is a hotspot within the hotspot. " But invasive species are threatening its wonderous ecology. Without intervention, the islands' more than 2,000 plant and animal species, 145 of which are found nowhere else on Earth and nine of which are endangered or threatened, could be pushed out entirely by non-native competitors like pampas grass,... Invasives are a problem pretty much anywhere humans go, and constitute one of the largest threats to biodiversity in several of the country’s national parks—they’re the number one threat in Yosemite , for example. But on Santa Cruz Island there are both more unique native species to. Source: www.outsideonline.com
