JACKSON, Wyo. — In late November, groundbreaking research on American pikas in New Mexico was published. The results, which are in line with decades of earlier pika studies and applicable to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), suggest that climate change is not acting on all populations of the same species uniformly across landscapes of western North America.
In tandem with this, the research points out that extirpations, or local extinctions, do not always occur at species’ range boundaries like equatorial or lower elevation limits.
Erik Beever, who’s been researching American pikas across the western U.S. since 1994 in 16 different regions and is an author of the newly published paper, tells Buckrail that this shift in understanding of climate change across landscapes is a huge revelation.
“I think that’s one of the most important results that we’ve had across 30 years of working on this species,” Beever says.
According to Beever, with the possible exception of migratory species whose populations inherently cross broad spatial scales, conservation and management decisions are typically implemented at a local scale. Because of this, having predictions at a local scale is pivotal; this means taking into account climate change at that level as well.
Beever notes that the American pika is what might be considered “the poster child” for what are known as “metapopulations.” This means that different pika populations exist in stationary patches of talus (rock piles) habitat that are spread across the landscape; the patches vary in size, spatial extent and how isolated they are from other patches. While pikas rarely move between these population patches, pikas can recolonize another patch adjacent to theirs if the neighboring pikas go extinct locally.
Beever says this dynamic balance of blinking-out (extirpation) and back-on (recolonization) events is a central feature of metapopulations.
Beever tells Buckrail that acknowledging the spatially variable factor for how climate change influences individual pika populations, and how that results in “patch-level losses,” can result in more accurate future forecasts for the species’ occurrence and persistence in the GYE and beyond. Beever emphasizes that other researchers are increasingly incorporating such nuance into their modeling and forecasting, for a plethora of otherwildlife species, as well.