The grasslands of North America are threatened by woody encroachment. Restoring historical fire regimes has been used to manage brush encroachment. However, fire management may be insufficient due to the nonlinear and hysteretic responses of vegetation recovery following encroachment and the social–political constraints affecting fire management. We synthesized the fire thresholds required to control woody encroachment by typical encroaching species in North America, especially the Great Plains region, and identified the social–political constraints facing fire management in selected grassland national parks. Our synthesis revealed the resistance, hysteresis, and irreversibility of encroached grasslands using fire and emphasized the need for a combination of brush management methods if the impacts of climate change are to be addressed. Frequent fires alone may maintain grassland states, reflecting resistance. However, high-intensity fires exceeding fire-mortality thresholds are required to exclude non-resprouting shrubs and trees, indicating hysteresis. Fire alone may be insufficient to reverse encroachment by resprouting species, exhibiting reversibility. In practice, appropriate fire management may restore resistant grassland states. However, social–political constraints have restricted the use of frequent and high-intensity fires, thereby reducing the effectiveness of management actions to control woody encroachment of grasslands in national parks. This research proposes a resilience-based framework to manage woody encroachment in grassland national parks and similar protected areas.

Outdoor recreation in national parks has significantly driven the growth of tourism globally. Research on tourism management in national parks has grown due to increasing scholarly interest in the field. This paper presents a bibliometric review of the development, aspects, and applications of national park tourism management. Data were collected from the Web of Science core collection database, and a total of 3438 research articles from 1980 to 2022 were selected and analyzed using VOSViewer (Version 1.6.19). We here analyze and visualize the co-occurrence of research keywords with temporal overlay and cluster analysis. We also present a content analysis and conceptual and management frameworks by examining multiple aspects of tourism management to offer detail aspect-based management implications. These can assist various park stakeholders, scholars, and associated collaborative efforts with the issue of how to best manage national park tourism in the context of an uncertain future and increasing conflicts of interests.