Development of a monitoring protocol for the Copper Canyon paleontological area, Death Valley National Park

Bonde, Aubrey

Death Valley National Monument was established by presidential proclamation on February 11, 1933, under the Antiquities Act of 1906. The original monument contained approximately 1,601,800 acres. The monument was later changed to Death Valley National Park by Congressional action on October 31, 1994, with the passage of the California Desert Protection Act (16 U.S.C. 410aaa-83). With that act the park was enlarged to a total acreage of about 3,396,192 acres, with nearly 95% of the park designated as wilderness. Death Valley National Park is now the largest national park unit in the conterminous 48 states. The majority of its lands are located in Inyo and San Bernardino Counties, California, with a small portion of the park located in Nye and Esmeralda Counties, Nevada. Death Valley National Park (DEVA) includes all of Death Valley, a 156-mile-long north/south-trending trough that formed between two major block-faulted mountain ranges, to the east is the Amargosa Range and to the west is the Panamint Range. The vast lands managed by DEVA expose geological formations that span back to the Precambrian and preserve a great diversity of fossils including some of the earliest forms of metazoan life (Langille 1974; Corsetti and Hagadorn 2000). Because of this long geological record, DEVA contains a significant fossil record with hundreds of fossil sites; most representative of the Paleozoic, Neogene, and Quaternary time periods. One of the most well-known and administratively concerning fossil localities at DEVA is Copper Canyon. The Copper Canyon fossil area records a rich assemblage of thousands of Pliocene (~4 Ma) avian, camelid, equid, proboscidean, felid, and canid tracks and trackways (Nyborg 2011). First discovered by Death Valley National Monument Junior Park Naturalist H. Don Curry on January 4, 1938, the area has since garnered a great deal of attention due to its highly abundant fossil resources and the unique roster of Pliocene life forms preserved there. Copper Canyon is considered to represent one of the richest and most diverse Late Cenozoic vertebrate trace fossil assemblages in North America (Santucci and Nyborg 1999). Seventy-eight fossil sites are documented at Copper Canyon and are spread across 13 square kilometers within exposures of fossiliferous strata more than 1200 meters thick. The volume, accessibility, and sensitivity of the resources preserved at Copper Canyon has gathered the interest of researchers and the public for 85 years, however due to the concerns over past vandalism and theft incidences at Copper Canyon it has been closed to the public since 1942. A great deal of research has emerged from the many studies done at Copper Canyon (as outlined in the Historical Significance section of this report), however data, photographs, and a long-term monitoring protocol for the area has not carried forward through the decades. This report outlines the work completed to compile the history, research, track localities, and photographs of this area, as well as develop a streamlined and practical monitoring protocol to manage and preserve the 78 fossil sites that are now formally documented at Copper Canyon. Monitoring is an integral aspect of the National Park Service (NPS) mission of preserving in-situ natural resources. The results of monitoring programs help resource managers to track preservation and changes to fossil localities through time and drive management decision making. Monitoring of paleontological localities is also a stipulation that is mandated under the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act of 2009 (PRPA), which requires the use of scientific principles and expertise in federal paleontological resource management (16 U.S.C. § 470aaa 1-11). Regular monitoring of fossil sites may suffer from staffing and funding challenges, as well as physical challenges, such as geographic distribution, site accessibility, or site volume. The NPS follows a basic approach to monitoring, which is to collect baseline data (e.g., geospatial coordinates, site description, photographs, geological context, and concentration of fossils), weathering and erosional data, climatic data (temperature and precipitation), and any geohazards or anthropological hazards (Santucci et al. 2009). In addition, documentation of fossil sites using 3-D digitization, including photogrammetry and laser scanning, is becoming more of a mainstream and standard practice (Falkingham et al. 2018). All of these practices were enacted through this project, during data collection of fossil sites and development of the monitoring program outlined herein.