Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Shrinking range of pikas in California mountains linked to climate change
http://news.ucsc.edu/2015/02/pika-study.html[font face=Serif][font size=5]Shrinking range of pikas in California mountains linked to climate change[/font]
[font size=4]Study documents disappearance of pikas from low-elevation sites and shows how ongoing global warming will further restrict their range in the future[/font]
February 02, 2015
By Tim Stephens
[font size=3]The American pika, a small animal with a big personality that has long delighted hikers and backpackers, is disappearing from low-elevation sites in California mountains, and the cause appears to be climate change, according to a new study.
Researchers surveyed 67 locations with historical records of pikas and found that the animals have disappeared from ten of them (15 percent of the sites surveyed). Pika populations were most likely to go locally extinct at sites with high summer temperatures and low habitat area, said Joseph Stewart, a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz and first author of a paper reporting the new findings, published January 29 in the Journal of Biogeography.
"This same pattern of extinctions at sites with high summer temperatures has also been observed in the Great Basin region," Stewart said.
Pikas are small herbivores related to rabbits that live in fields of broken rock (called talus) in the mountains of western North America. With high metabolic rates and thick fur (including inside their ears and on the bottoms of their feet), they are well adapted to the cold temperatures at high elevations. Since they do not hibernate during winter, they spend the summer gathering grasses and wildflowers to store in "haypiles" for winter subsistence.
…[/font][/font]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jbi.12466
[font size=4]Study documents disappearance of pikas from low-elevation sites and shows how ongoing global warming will further restrict their range in the future[/font]
February 02, 2015
By Tim Stephens
[font size=3]The American pika, a small animal with a big personality that has long delighted hikers and backpackers, is disappearing from low-elevation sites in California mountains, and the cause appears to be climate change, according to a new study.
Researchers surveyed 67 locations with historical records of pikas and found that the animals have disappeared from ten of them (15 percent of the sites surveyed). Pika populations were most likely to go locally extinct at sites with high summer temperatures and low habitat area, said Joseph Stewart, a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz and first author of a paper reporting the new findings, published January 29 in the Journal of Biogeography.
"This same pattern of extinctions at sites with high summer temperatures has also been observed in the Great Basin region," Stewart said.
Pikas are small herbivores related to rabbits that live in fields of broken rock (called talus) in the mountains of western North America. With high metabolic rates and thick fur (including inside their ears and on the bottoms of their feet), they are well adapted to the cold temperatures at high elevations. Since they do not hibernate during winter, they spend the summer gathering grasses and wildflowers to store in "haypiles" for winter subsistence.
…[/font][/font]
2 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
