The Ambitious Effort to Document California’s Changing Deserts

2017-10-13

Excerpt:

A growing number of studies suggest a dim future for desert dwellers in the coming decades, as they face warmer, drier conditions. Temperatures in Death Valley in July were the hottest for any month anywhere in the world in 2017, averaging 41.9 °C.

Many biologists think that desert organisms are living at the limits of survival — and that cooler regions may be out of reach for slow-moving or short-lived species. Preliminary results from the Grinnell Resurvey Project corroborate this idea. Of the 135 bird species surveyed in the Mojave Desert, only the common raven (Corvus corax) has significantly expanded its range since the early twentieth century, Beissinger says. The ranges of 38 other species have contracted.

Others on the resurvey project are exploring how hotter, drier conditions might harm birds and mammals, by studying species’ metabolisms and how much water they lose through evaporation. Ecological modellers can combine these findings with the latest population data to better project how the desert ecosystem might fare as the planet warms.

Ideally, scientists would revisit these forecasts in a few decades using fresh data. But fieldwork of this sort is falling out of favour. Staring at the blue mountains on the horizon, Patton says that he doesn’t know who will replace him: very few students today train as naturalists, and museums and national parks are chronically underfunded. “Everyone wants to know how nature is changing and why,” he says. “But there’s almost nobody doing this kind of work.”