Warming oceans, pollution, more potent hurricanes, anchor drops, dredging and trawling. The Florida Reef struggles with a lot of impacts today. In fact, only about 2 percent of the reef that stretches some 350 miles from Biscayne National Park past Everglades National Park and down to Dry Tortugas National Park is covered with living coral.

For several months now at the National Parks Traveler we've been building an ongoing series of stories and podcasts focused on impacts to the Florida Reef and whether it can be saved. Today our guest is Dr. Erinn Fuller, an associate vice president for research, senior scientist, and coral health and disease program manager at the Mote Aquarium in Florida.

Dr. Fuller is on the forefront of efforts to offset impacts to the Florida Reef and restore its corals. She'll explain the various impacts to the reef and the work being done to offset them.

Capitol Reef National Park in Utah is one of the Mighty Five, as the state likes to say in its tourism promotions, and while it's somewhat off the beaten path, visitors are finding it.

In 2024, visitation to the park was a record 1.4 million, a number that likely increased in 2025 and will continue to increase for the foreseeable future.

Cognizant of the rising tide of visitation, the National Park Service staff at Capitol Reef has been working on a visitor use management plan intended to better manage growing visitation. Our guest today is Sue Fritzke, a former superintendent of the park and a member of the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks.

What do you do, where do you go, when you pull into your favorite national park and can't find a place to park or a trail without crowds?

Those are good questions probably going through many people's minds as the national parks become more and more popular with more and more people.

Mike Oswald might have the answers you're looking for, at least for the Western half of the country. Oswald is the writer and publisher behind Your Guide to the National Parks, a thick, fact-filled guidebook to the 63 national parks in the country. This year he's veering outside of the parks with a new book titled, simply, Public Land, 1,000 Western Wonders.