High in the mountains of the American West, in iconic places like Mount Rainier, Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks, a quiet but urgent conservation effort is unfolding.
The target is the whitebark pine, a resilient tree that grows in some of the harshest high-elevation environments and plays an outsized role in the ecosystems it anchors.
Saving this species, however, is not something any one organization can accomplish alone.
Photo Credit: Andrew Studer / American Forests
“A holistic approach to whitebark pine restoration is important because it’s a whole ecosystem, and so it takes a whole ecosystem of humans as well to work on trying to save this species,” says Eve Bernhard, restoration ecologist with American Forests who focuses on whitebark pine in Mount Rainier, Olympic and North Cascades National Parks. “There’s the National Park Service, nonprofits, the U.S. Forest Service, volunteers and Tribal partners. There’s graduate students, researchers, plant pathologists, botanists, entomologists, wildlife biologists. There’s all different people contributing to this work.”
In the midst of this cross-sector, collaborative effort is a growing partnership between the National Park Service and American Forests, advancing restoration across some of the country’s most iconic national parks.
A partnership rooted in shared stewardship
Whitebark pine forests span millions of acres. Because its expansive range crosses jurisdictions, which include varying land-management practices, regulations and guidelines, collaboration is essential to conservation efforts.
“The vast majority of whitebark pine habitat across the Western United States is on federal lands,” says Dr. Elizabeth Pansing, senior director of forest and restoration science at American Forests. “Whether that be the National Park Service, the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management, partnerships have been key to advancing whitebark pine conservation and restoration since folks started recognizing the species was declining. Those partnerships have been an integral space for information sharing and have provided a a venue for us to get tangible work done on the ground.”
Photo Credit: Nick Grier / American Forests
In 2023, the National Park Service and American Forests formalized that collaboration through a five-year agreement focused on conserving and restoring whitebark pine in the national parks where it grows. The partnership supports work in several key regions, including western Washington, the southern Sierra Nevada and the Northern Rockies.
Through this agreement, American Forests scientists and restoration ecologists work directly with park staff to plan restoration strategies, collect cones and seeds, and implement restoration techniques such as direct seeding and monitoring.
“It’s a really awesome partnership,” says Bernhard, who works in a rare dual role with both organizations in Washington’s national parks. “I kind of get the best of both worlds. I work very closely with National Park Service staff as part of the team and work in National Parks, but I also am fully ingrained with American Forests and the nonprofit world, including all of the other great work that American Forests does.”
That structure allows the partnership to combine federal land-management expertise with nonprofit flexibility and resources — a model that has proven critical for scaling restoration work.
Working across landscapes and disciplines
Whitebark pine is often described as a keystone species, meaning its presence supports a wide web of life in high-elevation ecosystems. But the species is declining rapidly due to a combination of threats: an invasive disease known as white pine blister rust, climate change, altered wildfire regimes and mountain pine beetle outbreaks.
Addressing those threats requires expertise from many different fields — from plant pathology and genetics to entomology or fire science and restoration ecology.
Photo Credit: Andrew Studer / American Forests
“Whitebark was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, and it is the largest-ranging tree species ever to be listed,” Pansing says. “Its distribution covers about 56 million acres across the western U.S., and it covers seven states. So we really do need to have an all-hands-on-deck approach that leverages the expertise that each person has in their own individual landscapes and their areas of expertise to ensure that we’re actually getting the right prescriptions for conservation and restoration implemented on the ground, and that we’re not falling into the trap that every single whitebark pine restoration and conservation plan should look the same.”
In practice, that means building partnerships not only between organizations and agencies, but also between specialists. Researchers identify trees that show signs of natural resistance to blister rust. Climbers collect cones from those trees. Nursery partners grow seedlings and test their resilience. Land managers determine where and how restoration should occur.
Each role represents a piece of the larger conservation puzzle. Collaborative partnerships, like the one between the National Park Service and American Forests, pool a larger web of specialists across various landscapes to focus on strategic and holistic restoration.
“Restoring whitebark pine is fundamentally a people-powered effort that must be built upon collaboration across landscapes rather than isolated projects,” Pansing says. “The partnership between the National Park Service and American Forests strengthens a growing network of land stewards working on National Park Service lands, enabling coordinated, landscape-scale restoration that gives whitebark pine a chance to persist for generations to come.”
One of the most tangible outcomes of the National Park Service and American Forests partnership is the seed collection that fuels restoration across the species’ range.
During the 2025 cone collection season in Washington’s national parks, crews climbed whitebark pines to retrieve more than 5,700 cones from trees identified as potentially resistant to blister rust. The cones — protected earlier in the season by mesh cages to prevent animals from eating their seeds — are collected during a narrow window when seeds reach peak ripeness. This collaboration provides a prime example of how cross-sector partnerships are essential to conservation and restoration success.
“Partnerships across landscapes and agencies improve our potential for success because local individuals understand their landscape conditions and can adapt the knowledge gained from research to their own environment to enhance our success,” says Regina M. Rochefort, Ph.D., a retired National Park Service ecologist, who spent 24 years of her career devoted to whitebark pine restoration efforts. “The partnership between American Forests and the National Park Service strengthens the network of land stewards and information sharing, providing a keystone collaboration to long-term restoration success.”
Photo Credit: Andrew Studer / American Forests
A solvable conservation challenge
Despite the scale of whitebark pine’s decline, scientists like Pansing emphasize that its recovery is achievable.
Unlike some conservation crises where solutions remain uncertain, researchers already know many of the tools needed to help the species rebound, including identifying disease-resistant trees, protecting important individuals from beetles, and restoring populations through planting and seeding.
“I wish people knew that the crisis that we’re facing with whitebark pine is eminently solvable,” Pansing says. “It is a problem that we know how to fix. It is a problem that we can fix. We have the tools. We have the solutions. We have everything we need to make this an Endangered Species Act success story. We need the partners, the funding and the social will to get it done. But we can do it. It is not hopeless. Not all is lost.”
Photo Credit: Nick Grier / American Forests
And that’s exactly what partnerships like the one between the National Park Service and American Forests are designed to do.
