Why it matters

Offering endangered species a free ride

26th July 2008

Mountain-top species acutely threatened by climate change

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A vast number of species are shifting their ranges in response to climate change, but some are finding there’s nowhere to go in their search for new habitats.

Salamanders, for example, travel along watery pathways that are becoming increasingly blocked by human-built structures or farmland.

Hardest hit are animals who dwell in the mountains. The warmer it gets, the higher they go, and the more restricted their habitat becomes.

In southern Europe, brown bears are stuck on mountain tops in the Pyrenees that are becoming too hot for them to survive.

And in the Rockies, a small, furry creature called the pika is proving to be particularly sensitive to climate change. Though populations could survive in cooler alpine regions further north, there is considerable risk involved if they attempt to migrate across low-elevation valleys.

In a paper in Science last week, conservation scientists from Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. posed the idea of assisted migration – transporting endangered brown bears to mountains in northern Europe, for example, or extending habitats such as coral reefs by placing concrete blocks on the sea bottom to seed the growth of new reefs.

Some biologists object to these measures as extreme, saying there are unknown risks on any number of levels.

Another solution that has been proposed to assist species migration is to build corridors between habitats – salamanders, for example, could travel more easily if they were provided with a strip of wet land between habitats.

Published in The Green Report in The Globe and Mail

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• Tags:
• Amphibians
• Climate Change
• Ecology
• Extinction
• Mammals

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