Rising temperatures and shifting weather patterns have the potential to cause "staggering" changes to federal lands, said Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., chairman of the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands.

"Science shows that climate change will cause a spread of invasive species, threaten native species, endanger watersheds, cause habitat loss and increase the intensity and length of the fire season on our public lands," Grijalva said Tuesday at a subcommittee hearing held near Joshua Tree National Park in California.

These aren't just future concerns, either, said Robert Keiter, an environmental-law expert at the University of Utah's S.J. Quinney College of Law.

"Many of (the parks) are already being impacted by climate change," Keiter told policymakers.

Examples include the slow disappearance of Joshua trees from the park where the hearing was held, an unprecedented spread of insect-caused diseases in Yellowstone National Park forests and the dwindling coral reefs in Virgin Islands National Park, Keiter said.

One of the witnesses at the hearing said the basis for these concerns is unfounded.

"My advice to the National Park Service and the subcommittee is (to) do nothing to mitigate man-made global warming or climate change because there is none," said John Coleman, senior meteorologist at an independent television station in San Diego, KUSI.

Other witnesses disagreed and said that as regional weather patterns change, many ecosystems' delicate balances will be upset, throwing them into disarray.

One example lies in the proliferation of invasive species. Non-native grasses are fueling wildfires in a number of U.S. parks, including some in Arizona's Sonoran Desert that have areas covered in buffelgrass, said Thomas Swetnam, a professor at the University of Arizona.

The grass's introduction into the area had nothing to do with climate change; it was originally planted to feed livestock. But a shift in the atmosphere's greenhouse-gas composition will likely promote it, and other invasive plants, over native species.

"We know that higher CO2 levels will favor cheatgrass and red brome at the expense of native species and that warmer winters will push buffelgrass higher in elevation and farther north," Swetnam said.

That's a problem because these grasses are highly flammable and act like bridges of tinder for wildfires.

"In summer of 2005, invasive grasses fueled desert wildfires that approached a quarter of a million acres in central Arizona and three-quarters of a million acres in southern Nevada," Swetnam said.

These wildfires kill most of the native species, but the buffelgrass and other invasive plants grow back even more prolifically than before, perpetuating a destructive cycle of ever-increasing wildfires.

Although many witnesses at Tuesday's hearing said efforts to stop climate change are crucial, they also said it's too late to focus solely on preventing temperature rise.

"We have to start planning for adaptation options now while we simultaneously work to stabilize emissions," said Jonathan Jarvis, Pacific West regional director for the National Park Service.

The NPS has hired a climate-change coordinator and created six working groups to formulate a plan on how to protect the parks as much as possible.

There are a number of ways to do so, witnesses said, including relocating species, protecting corridors used by animals to travel between habitats and protecting areas around national parks.

"Congress could adopt new 'unsuitability' legislation empowering the secretary of the interior, upon petition, to designate lands adjacent to national parks, or other protected areas, as 'unsuitable' for mining, logging, road building or other intensive activities that could exacerbate climate-change problems," Keiter advised policymakers.

Protecting the parks could not only help the species and ecosystems they contain survive climate change; it could help humans adapt too, said Melyssa Watson, a senior director at The Wilderness Society, a conservation group.

"They store carbon and provide large core protected areas that will be essential in adapting to a changing climate," she said. "These lands also provide critical services for our communities, including filtering the air we breathe and the water we drink, and play important roles in our nation's economy."

Many efforts to help protect parks can also provide benefits for those living near them, said Rebecca Shaw, director of conservation programs at the Nature Conservancy in California, which works to protect wilderness areas.

Coastlines, for example, could be drastically altered by rising sea levels caused by climate change. This could damage both the surrounding ecosystems and human populations, Shaw said.

"Yet strategies to defend and restore coastal ecosystems … have largely been ignored in favor of engineering projects -- (like) diking, building levees and hardening the coastline -- that accelerate erosion and habitat loss," she said.

The Nature Conservancy has teamed up with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to create maps that display critical habitats and threatened species in the Florida Panhandle along with anticipated storm-surge areas and human communities.

"By overlaying these data sets, we were able to identify areas in which restoration should simultaneously protect the most vulnerable human populations as well as many of the area's most important species," Shaw said.

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