The U.S. government has failed to protect our national parks in these times of disastrous wildfires, drying rivers, and melting glaciers. The parks also contend with pollution issues, budget shortfalls, a scourge of invasive plant and animal species, and now a global pandemic.

In a controversial move made during the spread of COVID-19, Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt waived entrance fees at all national parks, which encouraged visitation in mid-March. By late March—as some park employees tested positive for the virus and rangers could no longer enforce safe social-distancing practices on crowded overlooks and trails—Yosemite, Yellowstone, Great Smoky Mountains, Grand Canyon, and other parks began closing their gates.

Then on Earth Day (April 22), President Trump announced that the parks would soon reopen. Against the judgment of many park employees and officials from around the country, reopenings began in early May, and now most parks are open.

As the parks reopen, humans will once again lead the invasive-species list. Since 2015, a record 300 million-plus visitors have streamed into the national parks every year, and a surge of visitors is expected this summer. The consensus is that many of America’s “best ideas” are being loved to death, as people swarm into places that have their own compromised immune systems.

Years of underfunding and climate change are increasingly threatening the national park system. From the Everglades in Florida to Glacier in Montana, and the Smokies in TN/NC, here are the ones we stand to lose.

Special Report by National Parks Traveler

National park units in the lower 48 states are being confronted, and in some cases overrun, by issues ranging from climate change and invasive species to energy exploration and overcrowding. Natural and cultural resources are being harshly impacted, and in the case of invasive species in South Florida, some native species are being wiped out.

These impacts are not the usual park stresses at the road-paving or conservation-fencing level that can be addressed by maintenance or policy tweaks. What the National Park System faces is the prospect of transformative, even irreversible, change due to human-caused impacts, whether direct — such as overcrowding — or, as in the case of climate change, the result of policy and political failures.

Big Cypress National Preserve in South Florida just might be the National Park System’s poster child for what constitutes an endangered park. While so-called thumper trucks, 33-ton mechanical beasts that shake the earth in search of oil reserves, tear up the preserve’s landscape, invading Burmese pythons slither through this sub-tropical landscape, feasting on its native animals, including the occasional alligator. All the while, sea level rise is slowly, quietly, and largely unnoticeably, poisoning the park’s namesake trees with salty groundwater.

Cape Lookout National Seashore on North Carolina’s Outer Banks wouldn’t be out of place on that poster. Hurricane Dorian in September sliced up the seashore’s barrier islands like a hot knife going through butter. Meanwhile, the possibility of a commercial spaceport arising just four or five miles west of Cumberland Island National Seashore in Georgia poses the threat of a dozen rocket launches a year that figure to impact the sublime national seashore in ways ranging from inconvenient to disastrous.

In this first annual Endangered And Threatened Parks project, National Parks Traveler takes a look at those landscapes that are struggling to retain the qualities that led to their inclusion in the National Park System in the first place.