Sloth bears and confused birds: What a warming planet means for wildlife
Bears fish in Alaska rivers. photo: Theriot
Below is an excerpt from Columbia Magazine’s story.
The Alaskan tundra, a vast, windswept, treeless region on the edge of the Arctic Circle, is a place of stunning natural beauty. But this pristine landscape, and the intricate web of life it supports, is under pressure. Climate change is warming the Arctic twice as fast as the rest of the planet, altering not only the habitats of its native species but the countless migratory travelers who spend the summer there.
Natalie Boelman, an ecologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Colombia, has spent more than a decade monitoring wildlife in the region, trying to understand how animals respond and adapt to rising temperatures. Not content to focus on a single species, as many ecologists do, Borman has overseen a series of large studies to assess how climate change is altering entire biomes.
Natalie Boelman at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.Photo: Francesco Fiondra
“Everyone knows the polar bears here are in trouble,” she said. “But what about grizzlies, caribou, songbirds, waterfowl, rodents and insects? How do they cope? How are their destinies interconnected and linked to their physical environment? It’s the bigger picture.”
To gain a complete picture of animal life on the tundra, Boelman and her colleagues combined traditional field trips with innovative data collection techniques. They set up dozens of microphones and tape recorders to detect the presence of birds with songs and calls, cameras at key locations to record the entry and exit of various species, and tiny GPS sensors for numerous animals to transmit their locations to satellites.
