We conducted detailed resurveys of a montane mammal, Urocitellus beldingi, to examine the effects of climate change on persistence along the trailing edge of its range. Of 74 California sites where U. beldingi were historically recorded (1902–1966), 42 per cent were extirpated, with no evidence for colonization of previously unoccupied sites. Increases in both precipitation and temperature predicted site extirpations, potentially owing to snowcover loss. Surprisingly, human land-use change buffered climate change impacts, leading to increased persistence and abundance.

The Forest Department is all set to conduct a bird census in the Biligiriranganathaswamy Tiger (BRT) Reserve forest in November, after a gap of 15 years.

The Biligiriranganabetta is a unique hill where the Eastern and Western Ghats meet. It is home to more than 1,000 varieties of plants. Twenty-four varieties of mammals, 22 varieties of reptiles, 11 species of bipeds and 145 species of butterflies are found in the forest. So far, 274 varieties of birds have been identified in the reserve forests. Among them, 18 are on the verge of extinction. Ornithologists from Bangalore, M B Krishna and S Subramanya, had conducted a bird census in the reserve forest in 1997. In subsequent years, several ornithologists conducted studies at Biligiriranganabetta. But census was never undertaken again.

Interest in forecasting impacts of climate change have heightened attention in recent decades to how animals respond to variation in climate and weather patterns. One difficulty in determining animal response to climate variation is lack of long-term datasets that record animal behaviors over decadal scales. We used radar observations from the national NEXRAD network of Doppler weather radars to measure how group behavior in a colonially-roosting bat species responded to annual variation in climate and daily variation in weather over the past 11 years.

The destruction of great swaths of the Brazilian Amazon has turned scores of rare species into the walking dead, doomed to disappear even if deforestation were halted in the region overnight, accor

The proportion of organisms exposed to warm conditions is predicted to increase during global warming. To better understand how bats might respond to climate change, we aimed to obtain the first data on how use of torpor, a crucial survival strategy of small bats, is affected by temperature in the tropics. Over two mild winters, tropical free-ranging bats (Nyctophilus bifax, 10 g, n = 13) used torpor on 95% of study days and were torpid for 33.5±18.8% of 113 days measured.

The Guassa area of Menz in the Central Highlands of Ethiopia is an Afro-alpine ecological community with an indigenous resource management system. The local community harvest different resources including collecting grass and firewood from the Guassa area. Cattle and other livestock are also grazed in the Guassa area, especially during the dry season. Several sympatric species of endemic rodents dominate the small mammal ecological communities in the Guassa area, and form most of the diet of the endangered Ethiopian wolf.

The Red list of threatened species, prepared by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), has listed 132 species of plants and animals as Critically Endangered, the most threatened category, from India.

Plants seemed to be the most threatened life form with 60 species being listed as Critically Endangered and 141 as Endangered. The Critically Endangered list included 18 species of amphibians, 14 fishes and 10 mammals.

When faced with rapidly changing environments, wildlife species are left to adapt, disperse or disappear. Consequently, there is value in investigating the connectivity of populations of species inhabiting different environments in order to evaluate dispersal as a potential strategy for persistence in the face of climate change. Here, we begin to investigate the processes that shape genetic variation within American pika populations from the northern periphery of their range, the central Coast Mountains of British Columbia, Canada.

The Lakshadweep group of islands, one of the most biologically diverse and fragile environments in India, is under pressure from population, urbanisation, development of tourism, unregulated construction, pollution, and land use changes.

A study on the state of the environment of the union territory, conducted by the Kerala State Council for Science, Technology and Environment (KSCSTE), has found that rising sea level and climate change are as much of a threat as human activities to the archipelago comprising corals, lagoons, sea grass, beaches, and sand dunes.

A survey of hunting and consumption of wild animals among the Sherpas community in and around Singhalila National Park was conducted. Rate and pattern of hunting of animal species, their importance to respondents, hunting techniques, and reasons for hunting were studied.

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