MISSOULA, Mont.— In a victory for wolverines, a Montana District Court decided late Thursday to restore the species as a candidate for protection under the Endangered Species Act. The court agreed with conservation groups that wolverines need additional protections while the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reconsiders its 2020 decision not to protect the species […]
Tag: global warming
Rapid Global Warming is Driving Southern Yellow-Billed Hornbills to Local Extinction
Global heating is exacerbating the harsh conditions associated with arid environments by elevating average air temperatures and increasing the frequency and intensity of heatwaves and drought. Possible consequences for animals inhabiting arid regions include increased frequency of mass mortality events and disastrous reproductive failures. However, heatwaves, especially in association with droughts, may also have insidious […]
‘Cooling the climate for 10,000 years’: How saving wetlands can help save the world
Buffeted by the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Pacific on the other, the Mitre Peninsula, at the far southern tip of South America, is one of the coldest, harshest places on the planet. “It’s the end of the earth,” said Martina Sasso, program coordinator at Rewilding Argentina But this 2,400-square-kilometer slab is also […]
Amazonian birds are shrinking in response to climate change, study shows
The canary in the coal mine for how climate change is affecting the treasure trove of biodiversity in the Amazon is … also a bird. Dozens of them, in fact, according to a new study that shows the changing climate is actually shrinking their bodies and elongating their wings. “Our findings show that man-made climate […]
Ice Loss Forces Polar Bears to Inbreed
A recent study found that 10% of polar bear diversity has been lost between 1995 to 2016. Scientists analyzed two generations of bears around the time of the rapid ice loss in the Barents sea. They observed that the leading cause of the decline in genetic diversity was primarily climate change, as it had detrimental […]
Melting ice imperils 98 percent of Emperor penguin colonies by 2100
WASHINGTON — With climate change threatening the sea ice habitat of Emperor penguins, the US Fish and Wildlife Service on Tuesday announced a proposal to list the species as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. “The lifecycle of Emperor penguins is tied to having stable sea ice, which they need to breed, to feed and […]
Philippines’ rich bird life is more threatened than we thought, study says
The Philippines is made up of more than 7,000 islands, supporting an extraordinary number of species that occur nowhere else on the planet. Eighty-six new endemic bird species have been described in the Philippines in just the last decade — more than all avian endemics ever recorded in either China or India. Nevertheless, the country’s […]
Key species at risk if planet heats up by more than 1.5C, report finds
Corals will bleach, penguins will lose their Antarctic ice floes, puffins around the UK coast will be unable to feed their young, and the black-headed squirrel monkey of the Amazon could be wiped out if the world fails to limit global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Beyond a 1.5C rise, many species will face […]