One out of five plant species are threatened with extinction. Almost a quarter of mammal species are endangered. The situation is just as bad or worse for reptiles (21% endangered), amphibians (30%), fish (21%), insects (22%) and mollusks (41%). Birds are doing slightly better (“just” 12% endangered). The main culprit has been habitat loss, but climate change will only make a bad situation much, much worse.
The western US is on fire. California has already seen a record 3,600 square miles burn this year. Wildfires are also blazing in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. If it’s not the heat, it’s the wind or the lightening strikes, or all three. And the smoke! Spreading ash and darkness in its wake. Here’s what my front yard looked like from the relative safety of the living room, hundreds of miles away from the main fire action - at 9am this morning, usually a time of cats basking in the sun. Not so today.
We Bay Area humans have been lucky, though. All we got was dirty cars and gloomy darkness. That’s nothing compared to what fire-zone critters got: death and destruction. With the promise of more to come.
Way back in 2016 I wrote the following:
“We cannot escape risk, because we cannot stop change. So what was a safe bet before becomes a risky bet, because the variables keep shifting.
Keeping species in their current habitats could lead to their extinction if they're unable to adjust to the local effects of climate change. Expanding contiguous wild habitat may make it easier for animals and plants to incrementally migrate in response to changing conditions, so let's do all we can on that front. But there will be man-made and natural barriers to migration and in those cases we'll have to directly intervene and move vulnerable species to new habitats. These new inhabitants will become ‘invasive species’. So be it. We will have to manage the risk”.
– Exploring the Problem Space, Moving Species to Save Them
A climate-driven global redistribution of species is already underway. But many of the species at greatest risk of extinction from changing weather patterns have insurmountable dispersal barriers – they can’t move elsewhere without help, because roads, cities, farmland, and warring humans get in the way. We could “let nature take its course”, meaning allow mass extinctions. Or, we could very carefully and only as a last resort, move endangered species to save them. Of course, introduced species would have to be monitored closely to insure they’re not too disruptive a presence in their new biological communities. But those communities are already being disrupted by climate change.
And instead of calling the newcomers “invasive species”, let’s call them migrants.
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References
Hoegh-Guldberg, O. et al. Moving with the times: assisted colonization and rapid climate change. Science, July 18, 2008
Huntley, B. and Webb, T. Migration: Species' Response to Climatic Variations Caused by Changes in the Earth's Orbit Journal of Biogeography Vol. 16, No. 1 (Jan., 1989), pp. 5-19. DOI: 10.2307/2845307
Loss, S. R., L. A. Terwilliger, et al. (2011). "Assisted colonization: Integrating conservation strategies in the face of climate change." Biological Conservation 144(1): 92-100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2010.11.016
Mascaro J, Hughes RF, Schnitzer SA (2011) Novel forests maintain ecosystem processes after the decline of native tree species. Ecological Monographs 82(2): 221-228. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/11-1014.1
Prach, K. and L. R. Walker (2011). "Four opportunities for studies of ecological succession." Trends in Ecology & Evolution 26(3): 119-123.
Scheffers, B.R., Pecl, G. Persecuting, protecting or ignoring biodiversity under climate change. Nat. Clim. Chang. 9, 581–586 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0526-5