A Future-Oriented Initiative for the World's First National Park

In 1966, Dr. Thomas Brock, a research scientist from Indiana University, made a startling discovery while working at Yellowstone National Park; previously unknown life forms thrived in the extremely high temperatures (extremophiles) of the park's protected thermal environments. One of those extremophiles he named Thermus aquaticus. Within thirty years, Dr. Brock's discoveries, including Thermus aquaticus, became central to today's revolutionary advances in the biological sciences.

Although some 19th-century explorers recognized that the colorful deposits surrounding many thermal features at Yellowstone might suggest the presence of microscopic life, Dr. Brock's discovery of new life forms in waters too hot to touch suggested that the diversity of life protected by the park, much of it still unexplored, was far greater than anyone previously imagined.

Indeed, we now know that Yellowstone's 10,000 thermal features, including hot springs, geysers, fumaroles and boiling mudpots, provide a rare habitat for many forms of microscopic life only recently discovered - life too small to see, but reflecting biological diversity that rivals the tropical rainforests and thriving in habitats once thought too extreme to support life.

Significantly, research conducted on these heat-loving microorganisms - or, 'thermophiles' - yielded economic and scientific benefits that could strengthen biological resource conservation efforts at Yellowstone and other national parks and conservation areas across America.

A Window on a New World

While 19th-century explorers were amazed by the rich diversity of megafauna, such as bear, elk and bison found at Yellowstone, the recent and ongoing discovery of new life forms in Yellowstone's hot springs has sparked a renaissance of scientific interest at the Park. Recent research activities at Yellowstone indicate that less than one percent of the microorganisms living in the park's 10,000 thermal features have been identified. Take for example NASA's research at Yellowstone, that suggests the Park's thermal environments provide some of the world's best preserved 'windows' on the origin of life on earth as well as clues about the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe.

Valuable applications of research results on microorganisms first discovered at Yellowstone are contributing to expanding scientific interest in the Park's thermophilic biological resources. Biotechnology applications resulting from research involving Thermus aquaticus have led to the development of diagnostic tests for HIV and revolutionized forensics through "DNA fingerprinting."

Other valuable applications of research involving Yellowstone thermophiles have been applied in the manufacture of antibiotics, plastics, detergents and fermentation products that have generated very valuable benefits to society. Other thermophiles offer environmentally-friendly solutions such as oil spill remediation, the decomposition of paints, the conversion of corn to ethanol, and the removal of sulfur from coal. The total global market value of products resulting from microbial research is growing rapidly and by some estimates the value may exceed $15 billion annually.

WFED and Yellowstone - A First for the US

Beginning in 1995, WFED began assisting the Yellowstone Center for Resources and the US National Park Service in the development of a conservation-based bioprospecting initiative that aimed to improve the quality of scientific study on park resources and implement an equitable benefit-sharing program that promoted key conservation projects in the Park.

Before WFED's work with Yellowstone, discoveries from research on Park resources were both useful and valuable but most often failed to benefit the Park's resource conservation mission. The most well known example involved research on a microorganism first discovered at Yellowstone and named Thermus aquaticus. Research on Thermus aquaticus resulted in isolation of a heat-stable enzyme known as Taq polymerase that proved instrumental in development of the 'polymerase chain reaction' (PCR) - a Nobel Prize-winning technology that has revolutionized molecular biology and related sciences. While PCR technology has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for its developers, none of the economic benefits resulting from this research on Yellowstone's biological resources reached the Park for resource conservation purposes.

Responding to public calls for a change in the status quo, Yellowstone, in 1996, requested that WFED facilitate the first negotiated benefit-sharing agreement involving use of biological resources managed by the Park. The agreement also was the first bioprospecting benefit-sharing agreement involving US public lands. The consensus-building process leading to this agreement incorporated public concerns, lessons from relevant experience in other countries, a thorough examination of existing laws and regulations, and extensive input from special interest groups and the scientific research community. The resulting benefit-sharing agreement created a cooperative research arrangement between Yellowstone and Diversa, a San Diego research company that pledged $475,000 in financial and in-kind contributions to the Park over a five-year period. Diversa also agreed to share directly with Yellowstone royalties earned from all applications resulting from its research involving Yellowstone's biodiversity.

For the first time, Yellowstone was positioned to benefit from research on Park resources and to reinvest those benefits for resource conservation purposes. Most informed commentators, including the 500,000-member National Parks and Conservation Association, applauded Yellowstone's benefit-sharing initiative as a major advance for biodiversity conservation and stewardship.

WFED Assists with New Legislation

In 1998, WFED assisted the National Park Service in creating an effective legislative proposal to authorize benefit-sharing agreements between national parks and private entities. The provisions approved by Congress in the National Parks Omnibus Management Act of 1998 expressly provide key authority for the National Park Service (NPS) to expand development of equitable and efficient benefit-sharing arrangements with the research community.

New Microbial Biodiversity Conservation Activities

Additional project activities strengthened conservation of in-situ and ex-situ thermal habitats and initiated the development of the National Park Service Special Collection of microbial culture collections at the American Type Culture Collection.

The project also participated in the creation of an integrated database that included habitat, geographical, biological and other key scientific information to benefit park conservation and thermophile management practices. For more information on the continuing development of this database, please see "Mapping Microbial Diversity" in the September 2001 edition of Applied and Environmental Microbiology, co-authored by Ann Rodman of the Yellowstone Center for Resources.

Support for Scientific Research

The project encouraged scientific research activities to further our understanding of the origins and patterns of microbial biodiversity at Yellowstone through expanded study of the Park's thermal habitats and promotion of activities to discover and characterize new microbial forms, biochemical compounds, evolutionary branches and habitats.

Community Outreach and Education

Throughout 1995 to 1999, in collaboration with YNP, WFED's efforts to develop a conservation-based bioprospecting program at Yellowstone included important community outreach and education initiatives as well. Sharing successful conservation and conflict resolution strategies is integral to WFED's mission. During this period, WFED produced key information and education tools about conservation-based bioprospecting and benefit-sharing agreements to explain WFED's work with Yellowstone, as well as the Park's experience in implementing a bioprospecting initiative. WFED's educational products demonstrated the increasing social value of natural resources beyond recreation, and emphasized ways in which new benefits for conservation and society could be leveraged through access and benefit-sharing agreements.

In 1999, WFED produced YELLOWSTONE Revealed - an original video production that now shows continuously at Yellowstone's Old Faithful Visitors Center. More than 1,000 people joined YELLOWSTONE Revealed narrator, Walter Cronkite, at the May 1999 premiere of the video hosted by WFED at the US Department of the Interior in Washington. Shortly thereafter, YELLOWSTONE Revealed was awarded a Silver Hugo at the 1999 Chicago International Film Festival for 'excellence in the art of communication,' and was nominated by the National Park Foundation for additional recognition at the Council on Foundations' Film and Video Festival held in Los Angeles. The film also received the Communicator Awards 1999 Video Competition Crystal Award in the categories of 'environmental' and 'videography'.

In addition to YELLOWSTONE Revealed, WFED also produced the Midway Geyser Basin Brochure, a model trail guide that introduces Yellowstone visitors to life in the hot springs of Yellowstone. WFED used this guide to evaluate public understanding of thermophilic life through on-site interviews with Yellowstone visitors in October 1999.