The vast, untouched landscapes of national parks are what make them special, but they also pose challenges. How do you preserve the rugged character of these areas while also ensuring visitor safety, monitoring wildlife, and employing staff effectively? Increasingly, it looks like cutting-edge tech — like AI and Starlink — is the answer.
The National Park Foundation (NPF), a nonprofit dedicated to supporting these public lands, recently awarded $10 million to support new tech projects at 21 National Park Service (NPS) sites. As national parks continue to explode in popularity, parks are betting that updating their tech can help better manage these precious areas.
What Is the Program?
Since 1967, the NPF has sought to support national parks. In 2023 alone, it gave out $115 million in funding to parks across the country. This round of funding focused on innovative new ideas to better manage parks. Over 200 projects applied, and the NPF awarded 18 projects that will help 21 NPS sites.
“These grants provide funding directly to those who know parks best, empowering them to test new approaches, implement scalable technologies, and share what they learn so parks are stronger, and visitors can have better experiences,” the NPF said in a press release.
What Are the Projects?
The projects that received funding fall into three main buckets: connectivity, data analytics, and real-time traffic management. The parks themselves are not the recipients of the funding. Rather, each park’s nonprofit support arm, like the Grand Canyon Conservancy or Friends of Acadia National Park, will receive the money and implement the projects.
Connectivity
Part of the charm of venturing into the great outdoors is unplugging from your phone and going off the grid. However, a lack of cell service can also pose challenges when it comes to emergency services and updating park visitors on potential closures or hazards. And so, five NPS sites will use funding to install Starlink or fiber internet in strategic locations.
Buffalo National River in Arkansas, for example, will set up Starlink at campgrounds and river access points “to improve the experience and safety of visitors by providing access to park-approved websites and applications for emergency communications, navigation, and visitor information,” the NRF said in an announcement.
In other cases, an internet connection will help speed up lines at entrance gates. Muir Woods National Monument in California will set up fiber internet so visitors can pay entrance fees electronically. Other sites that fall into the connectivity category are Piscataway Park, Virgin Islands National Park, and Grand Canyon National Park.
Data Analytics
Knowledge is power is a cliché, but it really is true. To understand where to put staff and how best to allocate a park’s limited resources, these sites need to know where visitors go. Six NPS sites — Gateway Arch National Park, Big Cypress National Preserve, Minute Man National Historical Park, the National Mall and Memorial Parks, Point Reyes National Seashore, and Steamtown National Historic Site — will use funding to analyze cell phone data to optimize operational decision-making.
Several of these sites do not have dedicated entry gates, making it difficult to track the number of visitors and where they are going. These sites “will work with Pennsylvania State University to analyze available cell phone data to help park managers make more informed decisions about operations, staffing, resource protection, and visitor services,” the NRF explained.
Real-Time Traffic Management
If you’ve been to a popular national park, you’ve undoubtedly experienced long lines at entrance gates or trouble finding a parking spot. These issues have only gotten worse after the Trump Administration terminated the timed-entry reservation system at multiple parks in 2026.
Eight parks will use NRF funding to set up sensors, badge readers, traffic counters, and other technology to better track visitor numbers and behavior in real time, and then communicate that information to the public.
Acadia National Park, for example, aims to “deploy sensors, predictive analytics, and communication tools that give visitors and park managers real-time information about congestion and wait times along key corridors,” the NRF said.
Yosemite National Park offers text alerts for when certain parking lots are full, but that is currently the extent of communication to visitors. The park is hoping to “design a unified, park-wide system that integrates real-time data on traffic, parking, and road conditions into automated, multi-channel visitor information.” Visitors will have a one-stop shop for all the information they need to plan their trip and adjust on the fly as necessary.
Other parks that fall under this umbrella include Cabrillo National Monument, Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, Glacier National Park, Indiana Dunes National Park, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, and Zion National Park.
And Also, Poop and Passes
The NRF funded two additional projects that don’t neatly fit into these categories. As a chain of islands located 22 miles away from the coast of California, Channel Islands National Park faces a fundamentally difficult task: dealing with human waste.
Currently, it hauls all human waste from pit toilets and other bathrooms off the islands via ship. This process is expensive, inefficient, and potentially disruptive to wildlife. Instead, the park hopes to use the NRF money to set up a waste incineration system. Yes, burning poop can be better for the environment than hauling it by boat.
The last project focuses on the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. The site does not currently charge entrance fees for day-use visitors, unlike many other NPS sites. This recreation area will use the funds to set up a pass system and charge visitors, in order to be able to afford updates to infrastructure. Delaware Water Gap attracted 3.9 million visitors in 2025, according to NPS data, so adding a fee system could mean big bucks for the site.
Why Does It Matter?
In 2025, the NPS lost a quarter of its staff due to cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency. Reduced numbers of staff attempting to handle increasing visitor numbers can pose serious challenges. Upgrading technology to better inform park staff and visitors may help lighten the load, or allow remaining staff to respond to visitor needs more efficiently.
The NPS may face even further budget cuts in the future. President Trump’s 2027 budget proposal called for a $736 million, or 25%, cut to the NPS budget compared to 2026. The organization also currently faces a $24 billion backlog of deferred maintenance. In an environment with increasingly limited budgets for parks, organizations like the National Park Foundation can help fill the gaps and facilitate improvements.
