CLEVELAND — National parks in the U.S. share some characteristics with parks in the UK.

What You Need To Know

  • Dartmoor National Park in Devon, England and the Cuyahoga Valley National Park became sister parks 

  • CVNP developed a farming program in 1999 to preserve the valley's pastoral landscape

  • DNP and CVNP are both within urban communities

Dartmoor National Park in Devon, England and the Cuyahoga Valley National Park recently became sister parks because of their similarities.

“It’s really a way for parks to share information, share best practices and become more connected globally,” said Lisa Petit, superintendent of Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

She said Dartmoor reached out to CVNP to form the relationship because of their commonalities, including the fact that both parks have farmland within their boundaries.

CVNP developed a farming program in 1999 to preserve the valley’s pastoral landscape and protect both natural and cultural resources.

“Dartmoor looks very different from Cuyahoga Valley National Park. They are wide open land and have ancient bronze age archaeology on their site. To look at us, it looks very diff but we share similar issues of protection and restoration of natural resources,” Petit said.

“Cuyahoga is restoring a landscape rather than managing a landscape because a lot of your huge national parks are really just managing what they’ve got there rather than trying to restore an ecosystem and a national park,” said Peter Harper, board member of Dartmoor National Park.

In addition to both parks have farming land, the parks are both situated near urban communities and one of the main reasons Dartmoor reached out.

“One of things we really noticed there was no rubbish anywhere. We didn’t see any litter anywhere. People really respect their national parks and we want to try to build on that in Dartmoor, so that people realize this is something very special for them and they need to look after it,” Harper said.

The sister park agreement was signed in June and will last five years with the goal of exchanging ideas.

“They learn a lot from our model, but we can also learn a lot from them. They do thing very differently than we do and, in some cases, do things better,” Petit.