Yosemite's Alpine Chipmunks Take Genetic Hit from Climate Change

ScienceDaily (Feb. 19, 2012) — Global warming has forced alpine chipmunks in Yosemite to higher ground, prompting a startling decline in the species' genetic diversity, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

The study, appearing Feb. 19, in the advance online publication of the journal Nature Climate Change, is one of the first to show a hit to the genetic diversity of a species because of a recent climate-induced change in the animals' geographic range. What's more, the genetic erosion occurred in the relatively short span of 90 years, highlighting the rapid threat changing climate can pose to a species.

With low genetic diversity a species can be more vulnerable to the effects of inbreeding, disease and other problems that threaten species survival, the researchers said.

"Climate change is implicated as the cause of geographic shifts observed among birds, small mammals and plants, but this new work shows that, particularly for mountain species like the alpine chipmunk, such shifts can result in increasingly fragmented and genetically impoverished populations," said study lead author Emily Rubidge, who conducted the research while a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. "Under continued warming, the alpine chipmunk could be on the trajectory towards becoming threatened or even extinct."

Read on:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120219143319.htm

Fish of Antarctica Threatened by Climate Change

ScienceDaily (Feb. 13, 2012) — A Yale-led study of the evolutionary history of Antarctic fish and their "anti-freeze" proteins illustrates how tens of millions of years ago a lineage of fish adapted to newly formed polar conditions -- and how today they are endangered by a rapid rise in ocean temperatures.

"A rise of 2 degrees centigrade of water temperature will likely have a devastating impact on this Antarctic fish lineage, which is so well adapted to water at freezing temperatures," said Thomas Near, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and lead author of the study published online the week of Feb. 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The successful origin and diversification into 100 species of fish, collectively called notothenioids, is a textbook case of how evolution operates. A period of rapid cooling led to mass extinction of fish acclimated to a warmer Southern Ocean. The acquisition of so-called antifreeze glycoproteins enabled notothenioids to survive in seas with frigid temperatures. As they adapted to vacant ecological niches, new species of notothenioids arose and contributed to the rich biodiversity of marine life found today in the waters of Antarctica.

Read on:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120213154053.htm

Glacier thief arrested in Chile

Climate change sceptics have acquired a new explanation for why glaciers are retreating: it's not global warming, it's theft.

Police in Chile have arrested a man on suspicion of stealing five tonnes of ice from the Jorge Montt glacier in the Patagonia region to sell as designer ice cubes in bars and restaurants.

Local media reported that last Friday police intercepted a refrigerated truck with an estimated £3,900 worth of illicit ice allegedly bound for whiskies, rums and cocktails in the capital Santiago.

Authorities have accused the driver of theft and are considering adding violation of national monuments to the charge sheet.

Scientists say Jorge Montt, part of the Bernardo O'Higgins national park, is retreating by half a mile a year, making it one of the world's fastest shrinking glaciers.

Environmentalists have cited it as evidence that man-made climate change is warming the planet. Sceptics have cited other explanations for retreating glaciers, but theft – until now – was not one of them. It may be the only case in which both sides agree human activity was to blame.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/01/glacier-thief-arrested-ice-cubes

Ancient DNA Holds Clues to Climate Change Adaptation

ScienceDaily (Jan. 31, 2012) — Thirty-thousand-year-old bison bones discovered in permafrost at a Canadian goldmine are helping scientists unravel the mystery about how animals adapt to rapid environmental change.

The bones play a key role in a world-first study, led by University of Adelaide researchers, which analyses special genetic modifications that turn genes on and off, without altering the DNA sequence itself. These 'epigenetic' changes can occur rapidly between generations -- without requiring the time for standard evolutionary processes.

Such epigenetic modifications could explain how animal species are able to respond to rapid climate change.

In a collaboration between the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) and Sydney's Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, researchers have shown that it is possible to accurately measure epigenetic modifications in extinct animals and populations.

Read more:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120131102519.htm

Massive die-off of fish in Philippines

MANILA, Philippines, Feb. 1 (UPI) -- Philippine officials say climate change is to blame for 49 tons of fish found floating dead in a lake in the country's South Cotabato province.

The local Tilapia fish, being raised in 50 cages in Sebu Lake, had a value of $88,000, Rex Vagas, provincial fishery coordinator, said.

He said 46.5 tons of Tilapia were found dead last Friday and 2.5 tons on Monday, Chinese news agency Xinhua reported.

Vagas attributed the massive death of fish to an "annual occurrence" locals call "kamahong," when water temperatures experience extreme increases leading to oxygen depletion in the waters of the lake.

"We ask consumers to avoid buying and eating Tilapia fish from Lake Sebu until further notice from us," Vagas said.

The provincial agriculture office blamed the low oxygen level in Lake Sebu on overstocking and water pollution, probably from fish feeds.

Fish cage operators were told to temporarily stop feeding surviving fish for at least a week to allow the lake's oxygen level to return to normal, authorities said.

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2012/02/01/Massive-die-off-of-fish-in-Philippines/UPI-77761328131771/#ixzz1lDp5rekt

Climate change affecting Europe's butterflies and birds

Fast-track warming in Europe is making butterflies and birds fall behind in moves to cooler habitats and prompting a worrying turnover in alpine plant species, studies published on Sunday said. 

The papers, both published by the journal Nature Climate Change, are the biggest endeavour yet to pinpoint impacts on European biodiversity from accelerating global temperatures.

A team led by Vincent Devictor of France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) found that from 1990 to 2008, average temperatures in Europe rose by one degree Celsius.

This is extremely high, about 25% greater than the global average for all of the last century.

In order to live at the same temperature, species would have to shift northward by 249 kilometres, they calculated.

But during this period, butterflies moved only 114 kilometres, and birds by just 37 kilometres.

Population decline risk
The data is derived from observations made by a network of thousands of amateur naturalists, amounting to 1.5-million hours of fieldwork.

The study was not designed to say whether these species are suffering as a result of warming, which is one of the big questions in the climate-change saga.

However, the risk of population decline is clear, the authors say.


Species that lag behind a move to a more suitable habitat accumulate a "climatic debt".

Eventually, the impact of warming hits parts of the local food chain on which they depend, such as caterpillars or vegetation, and this cuts into their chances of being able to adapt. Finding a similar habitat is made more difficult by agriculture.

The second study looked at 867 samples of vegetation from 60 mountaintop sites across Europe in an assessment of the hottest decade on record.

Continental level
Seen at local level, there was little apparent change during in the study period of 2001 to 2008.

But when the picture zoomed out to continental level, it was clear that a major turnover was under way.

Cold-loving plants traditionally found in alpine regions were being pushed out of their habitats by warming-loving ones, which invaded higher altitudes that were now within their grasp.

"We expected to find a greater number of warm-loving plants at higher altitudes, but we did not expect to find such a significant change in such a short period of time," said study leader Michael Gottfried, a University of Vienna biologist.

"Many cold-loving species are literally running out of mountain. In some of the lower mountains in Europe, we could see alpine meadows disappearing and dwarf shrubs taking over within the next few decades."

The research was the biggest plant-count of its kind in Europe, gathering 32 researchers from 13 countries. -- AFP

Bark beetles, climate change and our future

Recently, a classmate from the University of B.C. asked what I thought about Canada backing out of the Kyoto agreement, and if there was any connection between the insatiable bark beetles infesting the province’s forests and the rising temperatures on Earth.

First, trees are effectively the greatest CO2 warehouses ever created. For every metric ton of wood grown, 1.5 metric tons of CO2 is absorbed and one metric ton of oxygen is released.

Bark beetles like the mountain pine or spruce beetles and lightning-induced fires are nature’s emissaries of change. All forests must undergo a natural process of aging, facilitating regeneration — new life.

In order to fully understand what is happening in British Columbia and throughout the entire western North American continent, it is important to keep in mind that trees, insects and the climate are all inexorably linked; each plays a pivotal role in the feedback loops on nature’s gameboard.



Any change in the behaviour of one or two of these players inevitably changes all of the triumvirate’s interaction along with it. With little opportunity to adapt to new conditions, instability can cause remarkable devastation to entire ecosystems.

That instability has reverberated not only in B.C. and western North America but around the globe on every forested continent as elevated temperatures in the past 40 years of just over 0.5 degrees Celsius on average are killing mature trees by the billions.

In B.C., the mountain pine beetles have killed half the commercial forests in the last 15 years. Instead of absorbing CO2 these massive graveyards of dead trees are releasing 250 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, the equivalent of all the car and light truck emissions in Canada for five years or enough wood to build a city of eight million homes.

It doesn’t even begin to end there; the spruce beetles in the far north of the province into Yukon and Alaska have taken full advantage of warming temperatures by speeding up their life cycles, which formerly took two years and now occurs within one year.

In Kluane National Park and Reserve, Yukon spruce beetles have accomplished something never recorded in modern or past times. Since the cold ecological constraint has been removed, spruce beetles have killed over 350,000 hectares of white spruce. Before this, the largest spruce attack was a modest 247 hectares in 1977.

The long-lived, thrifty high elevation forests of white bark and limber pines of B.C. have also been decimated by mountain pine beetles because, again, the cold-temperature barrier precluding attacks is no longer in situ. Mortality in parts of northern B.C. ranges from 72 per cent to 80 per cent. These forests are crucial habitat for grizzly and black bears, and of paramount importance to retain winter snowfall, slowly release spring melt back into the water cycle and replenish the Pacific Ocean, its salmon, eagles, wolves, bears and orcas.

Death rates of white bark and limber pines across the western United States are as high as 90 per cent. The sentinels of the high country have become the tsunami sirens of global warming, showing ecologist, climatologist and physiologists that a warming world is irrevocably altering the landscape across the entire mountainous region of western North America.

It’s not just the forests that are disappearing but rather immense amounts of ice that reflect incoming solar radiation. One hundred billion metric tons of ice melted from Greenland during the blistering-warm summer of 2010. This year alone 50 per cent of Canada’s millennia-old Arctic ice shelves along the coast of Ellesmere Island vanished.

And far worse, the Southern Ocean which occupies 22 per cent of the total ocean on the globe, absorbing 40 per cent of Earth’s CO2, is acidifying so quickly (as a byproduct of absorbing rising CO2) that by 2030 the sea water will be corrosive to crustaceans, dissolving shells that the animals are making. This amplification will reverberate all the way up the food chain to the whales.

Data from the Global Carbon Project showed the carbon emissions from our planet had increased 5.9 per cent from 2009 to 2010; that’s the largest jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution.

The $17-trillion Alberta oilsands industry must spend carbon energy and precious fresh water to separate the gooey, toxic oil from the sand. Moreover, by burning this petroleum, humans will knowingly raise atmospheric CO2 levels by an astounding 150 parts per million. Earth will be uninhabitable for life as we know it.

If Australia, with its $10-trillion coke-coal industry, can ratify a carbon tax, then surely progressive Canadians can follow their lead.

We are running out of time to combat rising CO2 emissions: Earth’s forests are dying.

It’s time to embrace innovation and the cofounder of the London School of Economics, George Bernard Shaw’s dictum: “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

Dr. Reese Halter is a conservation biologistat California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks. His latest book is The Insatiable Bark Beetle.

http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Bark%2Bbeetles%2Bclimate%2Bchange%2Bfuture/5920382/story.html

Women bear the brunt of climate change

Women, particularly those living in the mountainous regions in developing countries, face disproportionately high risks to their livelihoods and health from global warming, says a U.N. report on Climate Change.



The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report titled ‘Women at the Frontline of Climate Change: Gender Risks and Hopes' says investing in low-carbon and efficient green technologies, water harvesting and fuel wood alternatives can strengthen climate change adaptation and improve women's livelihoods.


The report was released at the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP17) in Durban, South Africa, according to a press release issued by the ICIMOD (International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development) headquartered in Kathmandu.
Impacts of climate change, such as droughts, floods and mud slips are affecting a growing number of people worldwide, according to the report.
“From 1999-2008, floods affected almost one billion people in Asia, 28 million in the Americas, 22 million in Africa and four million in Europe.”
In parts of Asia and Africa, where the majority of the agricultural workforce are women, such disasters have a major impact on their income, food security and health.
“Women often play a stronger role than men in the management of ecosystem services and food security. Hence, sustainable adaptation must focus on gender and the role of women if it is to become successful,” said U.N. Under Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner.
“Women's voices, responsibilities and knowledge on the environment and the challenges they face will need to be made a central part of governments' adaptive responses to a rapidly changing climate,” he added.

The reports also highlights how organised human trafficking, especially that of women, is emerging as a potentially serious risk associated with climate-related disasters; as floods or landslips disrupt social safety nets.


http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/article2695894.ece

Amphibians face spread of 3 threats

WASHINGTON — Frogs, salamanders and other amphibians might eventually have no haven left on the globe because of a triple threat of worsening scourges, a new study predicts.

Scientists have long known that amphibians are under attack from a killer fungus, climate change and shrinking habitat. In the study, appearing online in the journal Nature, computer models project that
in about 70 years, those three threats will spread, leaving no part of the world immune to one of them.

Several important U.S. amphibian species — such as boreal toads in the Rocky Mountains, and the mountain yellow legged frog in the Sierra Nevada — are shrinking in numbers, said zoologist Steve Corn, who is part of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Amphibian Research and Monitoring Initiative. The problem is worse in the western United States.

About one-third of the world’s amphibian species are known to be threatened with extinction.
“It’s no fun being a frog,” said biodiversity conservationist Stuart Pimm of Duke University, who wasn’t part of the study or the USGS effort. “They are getting it from all three different factors.”

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/national_world/2011/11/19/amphibians-face-spread-of-3-threats.html

For the first time in 75 years, an entire genus of mammal is on the brink of extinction

You're looking at three of the last known hirola on Earth. Since the 1970s, unregulated hunting, habitat destruction and drought linked to climate change have driven the number of these large African antelopes living in Kenya and Somalia from over 14,000 to fewer than 400.

Of course, countless species go extinct every day — even the most conservative estimates show that the world is losing species at a rate 100 times greater than the world has seen in thousands of years.

But these hirola are not only among the last of their species, they're among the last of an entire genus — the taxonomic rank above species and below family. (As a point of reference, if the genus Canis were to go extinct, it would mean the disappearance of the planet's dogs, wolves, coyotes, jackals, and numerous other species.)

If the critically endangered hirola cannot be saved, it will be the first time the Earth has lost an entire genus of mammal in three-quarters of a century. (The death of the last known Tasmanian tiger in 1936 spelled not only the end of the genus Thylacinus, but the family Thylacinidae, as well.)

According to National Geographic, conservation efforts to save the hirola are already well under way; the Ishaqbini Hirola Community Conservancy is in the process of erecting what it claims will be a predator-free sanctuary for the species.

Whether or not hirola should be considered any more important, from a conservation standpoint, than any other animal facing the threat of extinction is obviously a subject for debate. But the more important question raised by the plight of the hirola is whether it heralds the coming of an age where the term "endangered genus" (or even "endangered family") will become as commonplace as "endangered species" is today. With levels of global biodiversity declining as rapidly as they are, such a future is frighteningly easy to envision.

http://io9.com/5857522/for-the-first-time-in-75-years-an-entire-genus-of-mammal-is-on-the-brink-of-extinction

Study Finds Culprits To Ice Age Mammal Extinctions

A research team involving over 40 academic institutions around the world is trying to tackle the question of what caused extinctions in the Ice Age.

The study found that the extinction of mammals like the woolly rhinoceros and woolly mammoth was not due to humans or climate change.

The team found using ancient megafauna DNA, climate data and the archeological record that humans played no part in the extinction of the wooly rhino or the musk ox in Eurasia.

The researchers believe these two mammals’ demise could be entirely explained by climate change.
However, the experts say that humans could have had part of the responsibility for leading to the extinction of the wild horse and the bison in Siberia.

“Our findings put a final end to the single-cause theories of the Ice Age extinctions, and suggests that care should be taken in making generalizations not just regarding past and present species extinctions but also those of the future,” Professor Eske Willerslev’s Center for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum said in a statement. “The impacts of climate change and human encroachment on species extinctions really depends on which species we’re looking at.”

The authors of the study found no clear pattern in their data distinguishing species that went extinct from species that survived.

“The fact that we couldn’t pinpoint what patterns characterize extinct species – despite the large and varying amount of data analyzed – suggests that it will be challenging for experts to predict how existing mammals will respond to future global climate change,” Eline Lorenzen, professor at the University of Copenhagen, said in a press release.

The study was published in the journal Nature.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112414031/study-finds-culprits-to-ice-age-mammal-extinctions/index.html

Climate Shift Could Leave Some Marine Species Homeless

ScienceDaily (Nov. 3, 2011) — Rising temperatures will force many species of animals and plants to move to other regions and could leave some marine species with nowhere to go, according to new research just published in the journal Science.

An international research team, led by Dr Mike Burrows from the Scottish Association for Marine Science, compared changing temperatures for both land and sea and from place to place over a 50 year period, from 1960 -- 2009.

The team used the data to project how quickly populations of both terrestrial and marine species would have had to relocate to keep up with the changing temperatures. They found that there was very little difference between movement rates in either environment.

Dr Burrows explains, 'When temperatures rise, plants and animals that need a cooler environment move to new regions. The land is warming about three times faster than the ocean so you might simply expect species to move three times faster on land, but that's not the case.

'If the land temperature becomes too hot for some species, they can move to higher ground where temperatures are generally cooler. That's not an option for many marine species which live at, or near, the surface of the ocean. When temperatures rise, species such as fish will be able to move into deeper water to find the cooler environments they prefer -- but other species, such as marine plants or slow-moving corals, will have to move further to find suitable habitats and could become trapped if there are no cooler places for them to go.'

Co-author Dr John Bruno, from the University of North Carolina, agrees that many marine creatures would have a hard time keeping up with climate change. He says, 'Being stuck in a warming environment can cause reductions in the growth, reproduction and survival of ecologically and economically important ocean life such as fish, corals and sea birds.'

The study also highlights the variation in ocean surface temperatures within a very small region, which also causes species movement. Spring-time temperatures in the seas around Scotland, for example, have arrived around 5 days per decade earlier on the east coast, whereas there has been almost no shift in spring temperature on the west coast.

Dr Burrows concludes, 'The areas where species would need to relocate the fastest to stay ahead of climate changes are important biodiversity hotspots, such as the coral triangle in South-eastern Asia. Our study may help conservationists to prepare for change and protect future coral habitats.'

The research was co-funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and carried out as a part of the 'Towards Understanding Marine Biological Impacts of Climate Change' Working Group supported by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, a Center funded by the US National Science Foundation , the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the State of California.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111103195314.htm

Climate change spawns the incredible shrinking ant

Oct 17 (Reuters) - Plants and animals are shrinking because of warmer temperatures and lack of water, researchers said on Monday, warning it could have profound implications for food production in years ahead.

"The worst-case scenarios ... are that food crops and animals will shrink enough to have real implications for food security," Assistant Professor David Bickford, of the National University of Singapore's biological sciences department, said.

Bickford and colleague Jennifer Sheridan trawled through fossil records and dozens of studies which showed that many species of plants and creatures such as spiders, beetles, bees, ants and cicadas have shrunk over time in relation to climate change.

They cited an experiment showing how shoots and fruit are 3 to 17 percent smaller for every degree Celsius of warming in a variety of plants.

Each degree of warming also reduces by 0.5 to 4 percent the body size of marine invertebrates and 6 to 22 percent of fish.

"Survival of small individuals can increase with warmer temperatures, and drought conditions can lead to smaller offspring, leading to smaller average size," they wrote in their paper which was published in the journal, Nature Climate Change, on Monday.

"Impacts could range from food resources becoming more limited (less food produced on the same amount of land) to wholesale biodiversity loss and eventual catastrophic cascades of ecosystem services," Bickford wrote.

"We have not seen large-scale effects yet, but as temperatures change even more, these changes in body size might become much more pronounced - even having impacts for food security." (Reporting by Tan Ee Lyn; Editing by Nick Macfie)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/16/climate-shrinking-idUSL3E7LC0VC20111016?feedType=RSS&feedName=nonCyclicalConsumerGoodsSector

Some species and regions won’t be troubled by climate change – Some will suffer

Ancient climate change has left a strong imprint on modern ecosystems

October 2011. During the Last Glacial Maximum (21,000 years ago) Earth's climate was much cooler and many species were forced to occupy very different areas than they do today. In northern Europe, for example, many of the species found today are relatively recent arrivals from their refuges in southern Europe. A team of ecologists and computer scientists have asked how fast species around the world have had to migrate to keep up with this massive historical climate change and whether there are differences in the modern communities between places with low and high required migration rates.

Required migration rates were estimated by calculating how fast climate conditions have moved over the Earth's surface at a point. This velocity depends on both the rate of temperature change through time and on local topography. On steep topography, a short distance travelled can produce a large difference in temperature, leading to small climate-change velocities.

Which species can adapt - which can't
What happens if a species cannot migrate as fast as it must to keep up with the velocity of climate change? Its range may shrink and, in some cases, the species may go extinct. This is most likely when climate-change velocity is high relative to species' dispersal abilities. The researchers tested this by mapping patterns of small-ranged species diversity for all terrestrial amphibians, mammals and birds. High concentrations of small-ranged species occurred where velocities were low (for example, the South American Andes), and small-ranged species rarely occurred at all where velocities were high (much of northern Europe, for example). Weak dispersers (amphibians) were most strongly affected by velocity, while the strongest dispersers (birds) were least affected. Within the mammals, bats showed patterns more similar to birds, while non-flying mammals were more like the amphibians. Thus, there appears to be a direct connection between the required migration velocity, a species' ability to disperse in response, and ultimately, the probability that a species will be driven to extinction by climate change.

This research provides the first evidence that past regional climate shifts interact with local topography and species dispersal abilities with long-lasting important consequences for the global distribution of biodiversity.

Most in danger
Anthropogenic climate change is leading to increased climate-change velocities. Moreover, there are several regions in the world including the Amazon basin and much of Africa where velocities have historically been rather low but are expected to increase rapidly in the next 70 years. These areas, by virtue of their historically low velocities, have high concentrations of small-ranged species. These species will likely be at particular risk as velocities increase over the next several decades.

http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/climate-species.html

Climate swings increase extinction risk

Scientists have begun to predict the animals that may become extinct in the next century because of climate change.

Researchers at Brown University in the US have combined predictions of climate change with the geographic ranges of well-studied amphibians.

While the animals will try to migrate to areas with more suitable weather, short-term temperature fluctuations can cut them off.

The findings suggest more effort should be made to relocate vulnerable species.

It has been recognised for the past decade that the continuing future trend of global warming may drive species to permanently migrate in order to stay in an ideal habitat.

Amid concerns that this long-term migration may be disrupted by towns and cities, scientists at Brown University Dr Regan Early and Prof Dov Sax set out to predict the shifts in species' ranges over the next century.

Predictions of global climate change generally show warming trends, though both global annual oscillations and local climatic effects will play a role for given species.

The researchers combined these climate models with information on the ranges and tolerances of various species of frogs, toads and salamanders in the western US, with results that "really surprised", said Dr Early.

While they set out to find the disrupting effect of urban areas, they instead saw that the short-term climate fluctuations were enough to stop a species' migration in its tracks, cutting it off from ideal habitats and driving it to extinction.

They have published their results in the journal Ecology Letters.
By Leila Battison Science reporter


Read on...

How to minimize extinctions due to climate change - New study

When budgets are tight - Fight firesSeptember 2011. More species could be saved from extinction under climate change thanks to a new model scientists have developed to guide allocation of conservation funding. The international team, led by Dr Brendan Wintle of the University of Melbourne and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions, is the first to develop a pioneering decision-support model that incorporates both ecological and economic information to guide conservation investment in the face of climate change.
Although scientists knew that high extinction rates were predicted to increase under climate change, there was little advice to guide how money could be best spent to minimise extinctions.

Dr Wintle said "The best part about this model is that it can be applied to a range of environments, including many of Australia's native ecosystems, to suggest how to allocate funding. Our analysis supports the existing evidence that climate change will substantially accelerate extinction rates. So the first step is that we urgently need to limit global warming to avoid a mass extinction. Given that we are probably committed to a two degree warming by 2050, we need to develop effective strategies for minimizing the number of species that go extinct as a result.

Effective allocation of funds
"We only have a limited amount of money to spend on managing biodiversity, so the question becomes, how do we most effectively allocate these funds? We needed a systematic approach to guide conservation investment to minimize extinctions and avoid wasting money. An advantage of our approach is that it makes the costs of a plan explicit, reducing the opportunity for politicization of decisions."

The scientists combined ecological predictions with an economic decision framework to prioritize conservation activities, and tested the model on one of world's most biodiverse and highly threatened ecosystems; the South African fynbos.

"An interesting result of our analysis is that the optimal allocation of money depends strongly on the yearly conservation budget. For example if budgets were small then the whole budget would be dedicated to fire-fighting capacity. However, if more money were available, investment would be directed toward avoiding habitat loss due to clearing and weed invasion," Dr Wintle said.

The team included scientists from the University of Melbourne, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions, CSIR South Africa, the NERP Environmental Decisions Hub, RMIT University, NSW Office of Environment & Heritage, University of NSW, the University of Queensland and a group of European researchers.

The work is published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/climate-extinction.html

Little auks go to the Greenland Sea to moult

Sophisticated tracking technology has revealed for the first time where little auks go straight after the summer breeding season on the east coast of Greenland.

Scientists found that the auks – one of the most abundant seabirds in the world – spend up to four weeks in a specific region of the Greenland Sea not doing much.

Their unusual idleness during this time suggests they use the area primarily to moult their flight feathers.

For the rest of the year, the birds tend to be on the go the whole time looking for food in the north Atlantic. But moulting renders them completely flightless. Indeed, in the same study scientists noticed that during their August and September moult, only two per cent of the birds were spotted flying, while 98 per cent sat on the sea surface.

It's likely they go to this region of the Atlantic not just to feed on tiny marine creatures called copepods, but also to escape predators on land.

'They're specialised plankton feeders, searching out the largest suitable zooplankton they can find: Arctic copepods. It's a wise choice, because these animals have high fat and therefore high energy content,' says Dr Anders Mosbech from Aarhus University, lead author of the study.

The likely reliance of so many birds on such a distinct region of the Greenland Sea means they're particularly vulnerable to changes in this part of the ocean. Scientists like Mosbech are particularly concerned about the effects of potential oil spills and climate change on the little auks.

'There's talk of opening up parts of the Greenland Sea for oil exploration, and an oil spill in a concentration area could seriously impact these birds. We're potentially talking about millions of birds going to a fairly distinct region,' says Mosbech.

Climate change is also expected to take its toll on little auks.

'The behaviour of these birds is adapted to the distribution of large Arctic copepods, which tend to be abundant in certain areas the Greenland Sea and north Atlantic, and depend on the climate. But copepods could move north as the sea warms up with the warming climate,' Mosbech explains.
Before this study, scientists knew very little about the auks outside their breeding season. But Mosbech says scientists need to understand their ecology so that they can manage the situation if oil spills and climate change does cause problems for the birds.

'The better we understand the distribution of the birds the better they can be protected in the planning of the oil activities,' he says.

Several million birds

Despite sightings of little auks in the north Atlantic, until now no one was quite sure where the several million birds from the Scoreby Sund Polynya and Kap Høegh colonies on the east coast of Greenland go once they leave their breeding grounds.

It's a very remote area and the seas in the Greenland Sea are rough and difficult to work in.
To find more about the movements of little auks once they've left Greenland, Mosbech and colleagues from the US, Greenland, UK and France decided to use tracking technology developed at the British Antarctic Survey.

They attached tiny devices called geolocators to 52 birds from the Kap Høegh colony during July 2007 and July 2008. Geolocators only weigh 1.4 grams, just one per cent of the weight an adult auk.
A year later, the researchers only managed to retrieve five loggers, because of either water damage, extreme temperatures or because they had difficulty finding the birds again.

'We had to rely on the birds returning to the same spot we captured them from a year earlier. But that's difficult, because there are millions of birds, and they sometimes change their nesting hole from year to year,' Mosbech explains.

After spending a few weeks in the Greenland Sea, Mosbech and his colleagues found that the birds head south to spend the winter off of Newfoundland.

He says the next thing is to find out exactly what they're feeding on and where they're getting their food from by studying stable isotopes.

'We also want to see where they're going to moult from other colonies across the Arctic,' says Mosbech.

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Anders Mosbech, Kasper L. Johansen, Nikolaj I. Bech, Peter Lyngs, Ann M. A. Harding, Carsten Egevang, Richard A. Phillips and Jerome Fort, Inter-breeding movements of little auks Alle alle reveal a key post-breeding staging area in the Greenland Sea, Polar Biology, published online 18 August 2011, DOI: 10.1007/s00300-011-1064-4

http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/news/story.aspx?id=1063

Walruses forsaking sea ice for sand

The spotting of huge herds of walruses over the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s northwest coast again is, according to scientists at the US Geological Survey, an indication of climate change in the region --- since the walruses are clearly forsaking sea ice for sand.

A large herd of nearly 5,000 walruses were spotted on Wednesday by a contractor taking part in federal marine mammal aerial surveys over the Chukchi Sea; and, second herd of 3,000 walruses was found resting a short distance away.

Even though the number of walruses recently spotted was comparatively lesser than those spotted last September, the researchers are of the opinion that the behavior is a sign of lack of sufficient Arctic sea ice for the big, swimming mammals for use as resting platforms after deep dives searching for food.
It was in 2007 that several thousand walruses were first seen on Alaska's northwest shore. They returned in 2009; and, the numbers that they gathered in last year were unprecedented --- with more than 20,000 animals counted near Point Lay, an Eskimo village which lies 300 miles southwest of Barrow and 700 miles northwest of Anchorage.

Noting that the melting of sea ice in Arctic waters generally goes on through mid- to late September, Bruce Woods – a spokesman for the US Fish and Wildlife Service – said that the herds of walruses gathering on the northeast coast of Alaska will apparently continue to grow this time round.

http://topnews.net.nz/content/217839-walruses-forsaking-sea-ice-sand

Earthworms are the farmers new weapon against climate change threat

The results of a major 4-year catchment-scale research project in Leicestershire that was supported by Heritage Lottery Funding has revealed that 40 per cent of farmers involved in the study now recognise the signs of climate change and are ready to respond.
Dr Chris Stoate, Head of Research at the GWCT’s Allerton Project farm, explains, “Our research shows that farmers can make a huge difference in helping to mitigate the effects of climate change. When fields are not ploughed the soil condition is improved naturally by the tunnelling of earthworms, which absorb water at a rate of four to ten times that of fields without worm tunnels. This in turn helps the soil to take up water during storms and retain it during drought. It also helped to buffer our stream from flooding during heavy rain.”

The study, which was carried out by researchers from the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, on its research farm at Loddington and in the surrounding catchment, is developing techniques that can mitigate the effects of both drought conditions and flooding that have an impact on the wider public as well as farmers themselves.

One of the key recommendations for farmers is to cut back on traditional ploughing in favour of minimum tillage in order to harness the natural army of eco-friendly microbes and earthworms that inhabit the soil. This improves the capacity of the soil to take up water during storms and retain it during drought.

The study, which involved the whole stream catchment surrounding the GWCT’s Allerton Project farm, also discovered other impacts that climate change could have on farming and wildlife as well as on a household level. It even suggested that it might mean taking on board some approaches from the past. The study revealed, for example, the way in which we all take clean water for granted and that potentially the concept of a ‘water footprint’ could be used positively to make consumers more aware of their demand on water resources.

Dr Stoate explains, “In the 1930s each person used about 15 litres of water per day. Today, we each use about 150 litres of water per day. Each litre of water consumed amounts to about 55kg of CO2 per person over the course of the year. Large additional amounts of water are used to produce food and other goods in this country and abroad, and the concept of a water footprint as a basis for a labelling system, was met positively by people living in the catchment that were involved in our study. This was mainly as it raised awareness about water consumption and the threat that this posed.”

Government farming Minister, Jim Paice, MP, in a personal tribute to this study said, “The Defra Business Plan recognises that the environment is the natural foundation on which our society and economy are built and that our long-term prosperity, economic success and quality of life are enhanced by our environment. As this study highlights, if we use and manage our natural assets in a sustainable way they will continue to meet not only our needs such as for energy, sustenance, fresh water and fertile soils, but the needs of future generation.”

A recently published book arising from the study titled Exploring a Productive Landscape, describes this wide ranging research project that has involved the GWCT’s wildlife-friendly research farm as well as the local catchment community. The research underlines the huge demands that are now being made on our countryside to provide food, water and fuel in the light of a growing population as well as the increasing threat posed by climate change and the depletion of our natural resources. It also highlights much of the significant research that has been carried out by the Trust on the farm over the past 20 years in an effort to boost wildlife populations while increasing crop yields. It offers positive solutions to many of the threats and challenges that we face over the coming years.

The full results of this fascinating study are available through the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust for £10.00 at www.gwct.org.uk/eyebrookbook. Proceeds will be used to continue to develop this catchment community project.

http://www.gwct.org.uk/about_us/news/3270.asp

Malaria claiming more British birds

Malaria is killing growing numbers of British birds including nightingales, sparrows and chaffinches, say scientists who claim climate change is fuelling the disease. 

Twenty years ago few British species showed regular signs of infection but now some 30 types are infected, monitoring projects have found.

The problem is linked to a rapid growth in mosquito populations, which is attributed to a rise of about 1C in global average temperature.

The proportion of house sparrows infected has risen from less than 10 per cent to 30 per cent, according to Laszlo Garamszegi, of the Doñana biological station near Seville in Spain.

He carried out malaria infection analysis into over 3,000 species around the world, comparing recent information to that dating back to 1944. The study is published in the journal Global Change Biology.

He said: "It does show trends we ought to be worried about."

The avian version of malaria cannot be passed to humans.

Ben Sheldon, professor of ornithology at Oxford University, said: "There is very convincing evidence that a wide range of biological processes are altering in response to climate change."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/8700698/Malaria-claiming-more-British-birds.html