BERKELEY, CaliforniaThe national parks weren’t established with science in mind. When the National Park Service was founded in 1916, it was charged with the mission to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife … in such a way as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

But some scientists—notably Berkeley biologists Joseph Grinnell and Tracy Storer—realized early on that preserving the parks “unimpaired” required understanding them. “Without a scientific investigation,” they wrote in an article in Science in 1916, “no thorough understanding of the conditions or of the practical problems they involve is possible.”

It took decades for the NPS to catch up to their insight, and today the parks—in addition to