ScienceDaily (Oct. 19, 2008) — Global warming is causing major shifts in the range of small mammals in Yosemite National Park, one of the nation’s treasures that was set aside as a public trust 144 years ago, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, biologists.
The study, published in the Oct. 10 issue of Science, compared small mammal populations in the park today versus 90 years ago and found that mammals like shrews, mice and ground squirrels have moved to higher elevations or reduced their ranges in response to warmer temperatures, essentially shuffling the species living together in any one spot.
“We didn’t set out to study the effects of climate change, but to see what has changed and why” since the last full scale survey in Yosemite in 1918, said study leader Craig Moritz, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and director of the campus’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. “But the most dramatic finding in the Yosemite transect was the upward elevational shift of species. When we asked ourselves, “What changed?” it hit us between the eyes: the climate.”
The central Sierra Nevada has seen a general warming, Moritz noted, evidenced not only by a 3 degree Celsius increase in nighttime low temperatures, but also the receding of glaciers – Lyell Glacier is half the size it was 100 years ago – and the increase in precipitation as rain instead of snow. Keep Reading
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