A climate for pikas
CIRES analysis helps federal biologists make protection decision
In February, Ray and CIRES’ Joe Barsugli, Klaus Wolter, and Jon Eischeid (all with WWA) completed a 47-page analysis of observed and projected climate changes in pika habitat. The team assessed climate observations at and near pika locations; and projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment report. They also "downscaled" the IPCC projections, to predict future climate patterns in 22 specific pika locations.
The research team found that for pika habitat, the average summers of the middle of this century will be warmer than the warmest summers of the past several decades, by about 5°F. Observing stations in parts of Nevada and Oregon show summertime warming of 2-4°F during the past 30 years. These findings are consistent with the large-scale warming projected by the IPCC global models.
The trends identified in the NOAA report are probably enough to harm some pika populations, especially those in low-elevation, higher-temperature parts of the Great Basin, FWS wrote in its assessment.
"However, these losses will not be on the scale that would cause any species, subspecies or distinct population segments of pika to become endangered in the foreseeable future," FWS said, declining to designate federal protection to the species. "We believe the pika will have enough high-elevation habitat to ensure its long-term survival."
TheScience
For the first time,
the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service
sought NOAA’s
climate expertise for a
species status review.
climate that they could use to inform their decision on pika status," said Andrea Ray, with the NOAA/CIRES Western Water Assessment (WWA). "We brought different threads of scientific study together to bear on the particular problem and provided it in about six months so FWS could meet their deadline," she said.
Pika generally live in alpine and subalpine rockfields, and their range includes mountainous regions in the U.S. and Canadian West.
American pikas, little rabbit-like mammals that live on cool and rocky high-altitude slopes, have become a symbol of climate change impacts for some environmental groups. They often cannot tolerate the relative warmth of valleys, and so if climate change forces their preferred habitat upslope, populations could be left isolated, on "sky islands" of good habitat.
In 2007, an environmental group requested that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) assess threats to the mammal —especially climate change —to see if pikas warranted protection under the Endangered Species Act. The FWS sought help from NOAA— one of the first times their expertise in climate change has been called upon for a species status review.
"We were approached by Fish and Wildlife to conduct a rapid review of the area’s
