Birds, plants, and animals adapt to changing weather patterns, who knew?
News Release
Dramatic Links Found Between Climate Change, Elk, Plants, and Birds
Missoula, MT – Climate change in the form of reduced snowfall in mountains is causing powerful and cascading shifts in mountainous plant and bird communities through the increased ability of elk to stay at high elevations over winter and consume plants, according to a groundbreaking study in Nature Climate Change.
The U.S. Geological Survey and University of Montana study not only showed that the abundance of deciduous trees and their associated songbirds in mountainous Arizona have declined over the last 22 years as snowpack has declined, but it also experimentally demonstrated that declining snowfall indirectly affects plants and birds by enabling more winter browsing by elk. Increased winter browsing by elk results in trickle-down ecological effects such as lowering the quality of habitat for songbirds.
The authors, USGS Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit scientist Thomas Martin and University of Montana scientist John Maron, mimicked the effects of more snow on limiting the ability of elk to browse on plants by excluding the animals from large, fenced areas. They compared bird and plant communities in these exclusion areas with nearby similar areas where elk had access, and found that, over the six years of the study, multi-decadal declines in plant and songbird populations were reversed in the areas where elk were prohibited from browsing.
“This study illustrates that profound impacts of climate change on ecosystems arise over a time span of but two decades through unexplored feedbacks,” explained USGS director Marcia McNutt. “The significance lies in the fact that humans and our economy are at the end of the same chain of cascading consequences.”
The study demonstrates a classic ecological cascade, added Martin. For example, he said, from an elk’s perspective, less snow means an increased ability to freely browse on woody plants in winter in areas where they would not be inclined to forage in previous times due to high snowpack. Increased overwinter browsing led to a decline in deciduous trees, which reduced the number of birds that chose the habitat and increased predation on nests of those birds that did choose the habitat.
“This study demonstrates that the indirect effects of climate on plant communities may be just as important as the effects of climate-change-induced mismatches between migrating birds and food abundance because plants, including trees, provide the habitat birds need to survive,” Martin said.
The study, Climate impacts on bird and plant communities from altered animal-plant interactions, was published online on Jan. 8 in the journal Nature Climate Change.
This release can be found in the USGS Newsroom at: http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=3069.
“The significance lies in the fact that humans and our economy are at the end of the same chain of cascading consequences.”
Which end?
Both?
Or is there, in fact any sense in using the word “end” when their are multiple complex interacting feedback loops in operation?
And yet, nothing similar could -possibly- demolish the entire paleo-dendroclimatology by significantly affecting which trees are solely “temperature stressed”.
one word destroys their whole study – “mimicked ” i.e modelled
where are the real data, observations and hypotheses?
Didn’t we have another story on something like this recently?? Yeah, there is a good reason why the bears turned white and learned how to swim. The ones who couldn’t didn’t pass on their genes up north 100K years ago. Now if we could only select for intelligence instead of breeding stupidity in our universities.
“Now if we could only select for intelligence instead of breeding stupidity in our universities.”
Not seeing that as a possibility in the near future -way to much $$$ involved.
Another GIGO, Garbage In Garbage Out report ripe for the shredder.
Oh the waste of time and money…
Wait, wouldn’t decreased snow cover allow the elk to graze on grasses for a longer portion of the year, thus improving the overall health of the trees?
And of course the governments restrictions on hunting couldn’t have affected the number of browsing elk which causes overgrazing.
With a full cycle of the PDO being between 50 and 70 years, a full cycle of the AMO being between 55 and 70 years, and both having large effects on regional weather in regions as diverse as Asia, North America and Europe, I’m comfortable in saying that a 22 year study of the effects of “climate” on anything is neither rigorous or complete.
OMG! Either build more elk fences or eat more “elk burgers”; there will be more trees either way.
Read this last night. Funny.
The real issue here is just the number of elk. But, as in Yellowstone, they have been lying about that for decades.
Until the late 1960s there were annual elk culls in Yellowstone to control the population. Then the greenies decided that they shouldn’t do that in a national park and forced them to end that. To create cover for this move they INVENTED what is called the ‘Theory of Natural Regulation’ whereby elk were allegedly controlled by their food supply… so the horrendous overbrowsing and annual starvation of elk there was supposed to be ‘natural.’
(This ‘Natural Regulation’ theory was actually just a science coated version of the ‘balance of nature’ myth.)
They could not admit that predation controlled elk numbers because at that time they were spinning the fantasy that predators had no impacts – as they worked on improving wolf PR – and that would also justify the culls which they said were bad.
Now that wolves have been re-introduced to Yellowstone, and have decimated the elk, moose, deer, and even coyote populations there, that ‘Natural Regulation’ lie has been proven false – though they will never admit it.
They are still trying to blame the elk damage on climate change in Yellowstone, so this is no surprise.
The whole Yellowstone elk story (mirrored in this story) is one of the best examples of what completely politicized junk the post-normal pseudoscience called Conservation Biology is… the same ‘science’ concluded that polar bears were doomed.
And this university is fully stocked with the people behind the Yellowstone fraud.
Anyhow, too many elk overbrowsing songbird habitat does reduce the number of songbirds, but that was not the point of this puff piece.
The reduced snow pack? Maybe there are more elk and thus some of them are having to use less desirable winter habitat.
http://www.rmef.org/NewsandMedia/NewsReleases/2009/ElkPopulations.htm
They “mimicked the effects of more snow on limiting the ability of elk to browse on plants by excluding the animals from large, fenced areas”
Now a fence can mimic snow. They could have just tied the Elk to trees with long ropes and calculated the Elk radius. /Sarc.
Real results of the study… No snow AND no elk = result, not climate change. I can help them with the elk problem. One at a time.
Where is the study on the improvement of the environment where the Elk are no longer grazing because they are stayin at higher altitudes?
I’m just wondering what their range was during the LIA.
Alan S. Blue says:
January 11, 2012 at 12:32 pm
‘And yet, nothing similar could -possibly- demolish the entire paleo-dendroclimatology by significantly affecting which trees are solely “temperature stressed”.’
Spot on. If Mann hears of this study, these guys will be banned from all peer reviewed climate journals.
There ain’t much snow pack in Costa Rica but there sure seems to be a LOT more animals and a LOT more kinds of animals living there. What part of ‘warmer is better’ is that these nitwits do not understand?
Defund and DE-GRANT these pathetic panic merchants disguised as scientist and let them do it on their own dime. You’ll find they actually will come up with something other than climate change mimicked models that Could, should, may, might, possibly and 20 other vagary’s these fine upstanding AGW alarmist inject into every report. There are plenty of jobs at McDonald’s for these climate flippers.
They’re depicting elks as near-vermin and birds as victims.
Just another case of four legs bad, two legs better.
Nothing new here on the theoretical side, but the results quantify the degree to which the ecosystem is being perturbed which is important for management (e.g., thinning the elk herd) reasons if you want to preserve rare plants or keep habitat for songbirds. These kinds of studies have been done for many decades. With better technology, however, it’s possible to get more refined results and presumably do better resource management.
Does the glass always have to be half empty?
“less snow means an increased ability to freely browse on woody plants in winter in areas where they would not be inclined to forage in previous times due to high snowpack”
So, there’s less browsing where the elk would normally be extensively browsing, spreading the “browsing pressure” across a larger population of trees. Seems like an improvement in the larger perspective.
IPCC AR5 bound.
Of course these weather patterns have never occurred in the past. They are unique for the 20 years studied. Horsepuckey.
The conditions in the 1930s had to be equal to or worse than those during the study’s period. Even so, the flora and fauna must have recovered between then and now so that the declines noted in the study could reoccur.
it is well known that animal populations and plant lives are variable depending upon numerous circumstances. One of the most influential is the amount of food available. one of the missing aspects in this study is a baseline for comparative purposes.
There’s one major problem with the premise of this whole study:
In North America (including Arizona), winter temperatures have not been getting warmer, they have been getting colder. Changes in snow cover are more likely due to changes in precipitation patterns than changes in temperature. The 2011 annual average temperature for the continental US was only 7/100 of a degree warmer than the average annual temperature of 1946.
The problem with stories like these is that they are evidence of a biased caused by assuming climate is warming even when and where it is not. For all practical purposes, there has been no “climate change” in Arizona in the past 65 year if one is to talk about annual average temperatures and winters have been cooling.
Maybe these clowns have actually discovered something – Climate Change can be halted by building fences.
Who’d have thunk it.
Breaking News 2014:
The remaining residents of St. Petersburg, Florida, most of them retirees, are reported to be experiencing strange psychological problems. When asked for an explanation, local residents mutter only “Tourists cannot afford to come here any longer.” Climate scientists from around the world have descended on St. Petersburg and similar cities and towns known as “former tourist destinations” or, more colorfully, “ghost towns.”
The preliminary consensus among climate scientists is that nine years without hurricanes has caused a novel form of acute anxiety among local residents. Apparently, local residents suffer from an unshakable fear that St. Petersburg has lost the appeal of a tropical paradise because it has no hurricanes. According to Professor Neuter from Pin Stripe University, “The significance lies in the fact that humans and our economy are at the end of the same chain of cascading consequences.” (/sarc)