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$35 Million in Grants to Boost State Endangered Species Conservation Efforts Funding to 20 states will help collaborative efforts to conserve America’s most imperiled species
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Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe today announced nearly $35 million in
grants to 20 states to enable collaborative efforts to conserve many of
America’s imperiled species, ranging from the red cockaded woodpecker in
the Southeast to a variety of bat species in the Midwest to a colorful
flower in the Rocky Mountains.
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News & Events
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10,000th Hellbender Released to the Wild
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The Saint Louis Zoo, Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC) and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) are celebrating a historic milestone in hellbender conservation in Missouri. As of August 2022, the total Saint Louis Zoo-raised endangered Ozark and eastern hellbenders released into the wild since 2008 now numbers over 10,000 individuals.
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Eastern Hellbender News
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A Collaborative Approach to Restore Bog Turtle Populations
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Like the bog turtle itself, bog turtle populations in North Carolina are very small. A collaborative effort between multiple conservation organizations hopes to change that by giving them a little help.
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News & Webinars
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Bog Turtle News
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A phantom road experiment reveals traffic noise is an invisible source of habitat degradation
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Decades of research demonstrate that roads impact wildlife and suggest traffic noise as a primary cause of population declines near roads. We created a “phantom road” using an array of speakers to apply traffic noise to a roadless landscape, directly testing the effect of noise alone on an entire songbird community during autumn migration. Thirty-one percent of the bird community avoided the phantom road. For individuals that stayed despite the noise, overall body condition decreased by a full SD and some species showed a change in ability to gain body condition when exposed to traffic noise during migratory stopover. We conducted complementary laboratory experiments that implicate foraging-vigilance behavior as one mechanism driving this pattern. Our results suggest that noise degrades habitat that is otherwise suitable, and that the presence of a species does not indicate the absence of an impact.
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Climate Science Documents
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A phylogenetic perspective on the distribution of plant diversity
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Phylogenetic studies are revealing that major ecological niches are more conserved through evolutionary history than expected, implying that adaptations to major climate changes have not readily been accomplished in all lineages. Phylogenetic niche conservatism has important consequences for the assembly of both local communities and the regional species pools from which these are drawn. If corridors for movement are available, newly emerging environments will tend to be filled by species that filter in from areas in which the relevant adaptations have already evolved, as opposed to being filled by in situ evolution of these adaptations. Examples include intercontinental disjunctions of tropical plants, the spread of plant lineages around the Northern Hemisphere after the evolution of cold tolerance, and the radiation of northern alpine plants into the Andes. These observations highlight the role of phylogenetic knowledge and historical biogeography in explanations of global biodiversity patterns. They also have implications for the future of biodiversity.
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Climate Science Documents
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All Downhill From Here?
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Biologists say climate change may already be affecting high-mountain ecosystems around the world, where plants and animals adapted to cold, barren conditions now face higher temperatures and a surge of predators and competitors
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Climate Science Documents
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Allometry of thermal variables in mammals: consequences of body size and phylogeny
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A large number of analyses have examined how basal metabolic rate (BMR) is affected by body mass in mammals. By contrast, the critical ambient temperatures that define the thermo-neutral zone (TNZ), in which BMR is measured, have received much less attention. We provide the first phylogenetic analyses on scaling of lower and upper critical temperatures and the breadth of the TNZ in 204 mammal species from diverse orders. The phylogenetic signal of thermal variables was strong for all variables analysed. Most allometric relationships between thermal variables and body mass were significant and regressions using phylogenetic analyses fitted the data better than conventional regressions. Allometric exponents for all mammals were 0.19 for the lower critical temperature (expressed as body temperature - lower critical temperature), −0.027 for the upper critical temperature, and 0.17 for the breadth of TNZ. The small exponents for the breadth of the TNZ compared to the large exponents for BMR suggest that BMR per se affects the influence of body mass on TNZ only marginally. However, the breadth of the TNZ is also related to the apparent thermal conductance and it is therefore possible that BMR at different body masses is a function of both the heat exchange in the TNZ and that encountered below and above the TNZ to permit effective homeothermic thermoregulation.
Keywords: allometry,lower critical temperature,mammals,marsupials,thermal neutral zone,upper critical temperature.
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Climate Science Documents
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Amid Worrisome Signs of Warming, ‘Climate Fatigue’ Sets In
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As scientists debate whether climate is changing faster than anticipated, some worry that a
drumbeat of dire warnings may be helping to erode U.S. public concerns about global warming
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Climate Science Documents
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Animal migration amid shifting patterns of phenology and predation: lessons from a Yellowstone elk herd
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Migration is a striking behavioral strategy by which many animals enhance resource acquisition while reducing predation risk. Historically, the demographic benefits of such movements made migration common, but in many taxa the phenomenon is considered globally threatened. Here we describe a long-term decline in the productivity of elk (Cervus elaphus) that migrate through intact wilderness areas to protected summer ranges inside Yellowstone National Park, USA. We attribute this decline to a long-term reduction in the
demographic benefits that ungulates typically gain from migration. Among migratory elk, we observed a 21-year, 70% reduction in recruitment and a 4-year, 19% depression in their pregnancy rate largely caused by infrequent reproduction of females that were young or lactating. In contrast, among resident elk, we have recently observed increasing recruitment and a high rate of pregnancy. Landscape-level changes in habitat quality and predation appear to be responsible for the declining productivity of Yellowstone migrants. From 1989 to 2009, migratory elk experienced an increasing rate and shorter duration of green-up coincident with
warmer spring–summer temperatures and reduced spring precipitation, also consistent with observations of an unusually severe drought in the region. Migrants are also now exposed to four times as many grizzly bears (Ursus arctos) and wolves (Canis lupus) as resident elk. Both of these restored predators consume migratory elk calves at high rates in the Yellowstone wilderness but are maintained at low densities via lethal management and human disturbance in the year-round habitats of resident elk. Our findings suggest that large-carnivore recovery and drought, operating simultaneously along an elevation gradient, have disproportionately influenced the demography of migratory elk. Many migratory animals travel large geographic distances between their seasonal ranges. Changes in land use and climate that disparately
influence such seasonal ranges may alter the ecological basis of migratory behavior, representing an important challenge.
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Climate Science Documents
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Appalachian Mountains Joint Venture Management Board Meeting
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This meeting will provide board members with updates on the AMJV staff, administration, and the presentation of a strategic communications plan.
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Events
