ECOSYSTEMS
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK
Yellowstone National Park
INTRODUCTION
Yellowstone National Park is a wilderness recreation area, the first-ever national park in the world was opened on the 1st March 1872 and covers an area of 8,991 km². The Park is found mainly in the American state of Wyoming but also spreads to parts of Montana and Idaho (USA). It consists of canyons, alpine rivers, lunch forests, hot springs and geysers, featuring the famous geyser, Old Faithful. The National Park is also home to hundreds of animal species including bears, wolves, cougars, eagles, bison, elk and antelope.
Yellowstone National Park is classified as a 'Taiga' Biome, taiga meaning “land of the little sticks” in Russian, the collective term for the northern forests of Russia. This biome is commonly referred to as a boreal forest or snow forest. It is a terrestrial subarctic and humid biome meaning that the biome mainly consists of cone-bearing needle-leaved or evergreen trees for vegetation, primarily coniferous forests which are also full of pine cones, firs, spruces, hemlock, larches, mosses and lichens. These biomes are commonly found in northern circumpolar forested regions which have long winters and moderate to high annual precipitation. this type of biome occupates about 17% of Earth’s land surface area in a circumpolar belt of the far Northern Hemisphere. Plants and animals in this biome have adapted to short growing seasons of long days that vary from cool to warm and winters which are long and cold, the days are short, and there is snowfall.
TOURISM
Yellowstone National Park received over three million visitors annually since 2008. It attracted a total of approximately 4.02 million visitors in 2019 and the year before, they made a total of 4.12 million. the highest attendance to the park was in 2016, with 4.26 million visitors. Many visitors come to see the unique natural features including geysers and hot springs, more than any other place on earth and wildlife like the buffalo herd (America's largest), grizzly bears, wolves and many others.