Save Species, Save Ourselves

Unless people are willing to intercede, certain species like the polar bear in the Arctic or the grizzly bear in Yellowstone Park may become extinct – available to future generations just as exhibits in museums, or images online and in print.

Pushing animals to the brink and then trying to bring them back is not new for humans. Examples of remedies include setting aside land for special habitats or making it illegal to kill them (such as whooping cranes and eagles).

But dramatic shifts that would accompany projected climate change mean that an animal’s traditional range may no longer be habitable to it in a few years, or that a key food source or resource it needs is disappearing. New solutions to these interlinked problems are required, and the methods are different than those used in the past.

“The business-as-usual approach to managing wildlife populations and resources is no longer likely to work very well,” says John Wiens, chief conservation of science officer for the Point Reyes Bird Observatory in Petaluma, CA. “We can’t say anymore, ‘Hey, we’ll do some management to control this threat, and everything will be honky-dory’, or ‘Preserve some habitat and some organisms, and everything will be fine.’ ”

Thankfully, there are signs of positive action. After years of what many saw as foot-dragging, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is leading states and other organizations in taking the first steps toward what could become a radical departure from today’s species recovery model.

The FWS’s effort is a comprehensive and predictive “adaptation management” plan to help troubled wildlife. Its centerpiece is the creation of eight new regional landscape conservation cooperatives (LCCs); the first of up to 20 nationwide that will enlist multiple partners to deal with global warming’s forecasted effects.

Along with the U.S. Geological Survey, states, and others, the FWS is now holding regional conferences on how to design the cooperatives.

“We’re just at the very beginning stages of LCC development,” says Dan Ashe, deputy director of the FWS. “We have to be able to be more predictive; to be able to look into the future to hoe climate changes affecting species like the grizzly bear, polar bear, or coho salmon.”

The devil, of course, is in the details now for future success to be achieved.

In October 2009, Congress provided $25 million in fresh funding for the cooperatives, each of which will have a core staff of scientists to create models of probable regional climate change impacts and provide scientific analysis for future wildlife management plans.

“The LCCs are integral to climate adaption efforts,” according to an internal agency draft ‘function and form’ document. Even so, they will not be “climate-centric” but will “provide scientific support for conservation actions addressing a variety of broad-scale challenges, including water scarcity, species invasion, wildlife disease, as well as changing climate.”

Using advanced computer models, LCC scientists will report how global warming could change regional ecosystems decades from now, allowing researchers to calculate whether a recovery plan in a ‘species’ home range makes sense.

That, in turn, might make it possible to determine if a wildlife corridor, a way for animals to migrate past highways and cities to cooler northern climates, is possible. More drastic measures may be required. An example may be trans-locating a species from one location to another.

Dr. Scott Loarie’s pioneering work points to a decline of up to 59 percent in pika populations across the western United States if greenhouse gas emissions reach the higher end of the scale predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Higher levels of decline could bring calls for more radical adaptive techniques.


Options for the pika, small, rabbit-like creatures which require temperatures below 80 degrees Fahrenheit, could include spending more time underground to avoid the heat. But that may mean pikas couldn’t survive the winter, says Loarie, a researcher with the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University in California.

WMB believes that saving wildlife species threatened by climate change requires global cooperation, a complex effort that presents challenges to scientists and policymakers throughout the world.

Wildlife biologists must figure out how to model adaptive management. They must urgently ascertain vulnerability assessments and downscale climate models to local habitats, and then determine the ecological impacts of these studies.

Global warming – fact, not fiction – will continue to force scientists to figure out new solutions to an ever-increasing complex ecosystem if it is to survive mankind, the highest and most destructive form of life on the planet.

It’s a simple challenge: If we can’t save endangered species, how on Earth can we save ourselves?

This post is by TechMan, WMB co-author who blogs about trends, issues and ideas affecting business, industry, technology and consumers. If you like this post, please share it with family, friends and colleagues.