What Our Animals Must Do To Help Them Adapt To Climate Change

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Our landscape is changing, and, as humans, we will be able to adapt to those changes. The animals, of course, will have to adapt in different ways, using the various avenues available to them, such as America’s waterways.

A bull elk crosses the Madison River in Yellowstone National Park. (Photo: Flickr)

As our world warms, a virtual network of wildlife corridors along U.S. rivers could give those animals isolated in wildlife refuges the ability to migrate safely.

by Taylor Hill

When the United States started turning the country’s most beautiful scenery into national parks—what some considered the country’s “best idea”—there wasn’t a lot of thought as to how these protected lands would function for the species living there. The landscapes were breathtaking, and thanks to John Muir, Ulysses S. Grant, and Teddy Roosevelt, they were preserved.

But now, ever-encroaching development just outside park boundaries is leaving wolves, elk, deer, bears, and many other species with smaller and smaller territories to roam. And when catastrophic events such as wildfires hit these “safe havens,” animals can be trapped, incapable of migrating away from danger owing to new highways, fences, cities, and other man-made obstacles in their way.

With climate change already impacting their habitats, animals are looking to move north, or up in elevation to escape the heat—but in a lot of cases, we haven’t given them the routes to do so, says Alexander Fremier, a professor at Washington State University’s School of the Environment.

“It’s easy to look back with the knowledge we have now and question it,” Fremier says. “Don’t get me wrong, the national parks are incredible, but they weren’t thinking about preserving the large-scale ecological systems together.”

If animals can’t move, they’ll die. So, Fremier plans to give them a route: American rivers.

He and his team of researchers call it the Riparian Connectivity Network, and they think it could be a way to connect the country’s protected parks, wildernesses, and wildlife refuges by creating a system of wildlife-friendly corridors along the nation’s river system.

The move would be a one-two punch: Protect wildlife and improve water quality in the process.

“There’s already a large movement out there to restore water quality in many of the country’s rivers,” Fremier said. And there’s federal legislation to back that up.

In a study published in the upcoming November edition of the journal Biological Conservation, Fremier finds that between the Clean Water Act—which regulates pollutantsallowed in U.S. waters—the Endangered Species Act—which monitors water quality in endangered species’ habitats—and state-level protection laws, many of the safeguards necessary to set up his planned corridors are already in place.

“What we found was there is already bias in protection standards toward riparian and water habitat compared to terrestrial lands,” Fremier said. One example is the lengths Washington state has gone to protect its salmon, removing more than 200 fish migration barriers and protecting 348 miles of stream habitat.

In California, ESA protections have kept water and therefore wildlife in the San Joaquin River Delta in hopes of protecting the endangered Delta smelt fish—a vital food source for large fish species.

Fremier thinks if these types of protections were granted to larger land parcels along these riverbanks, animals running out of room in one protected wildlife refuge could traverse the banks of a river and migrate to new safe, open space.

With 95 percent of the nation’s federally protected lands connected by a river or stream network, it could be the most efficient way to connect them.

Still, the obstacles of creating such a network are plentiful.

What could work in the West—where the federal government owns a majority of the land—could be a bit more difficult in the Midwest, where most land is privately owned.

Read more about how our animals adapt to climate change at TakePart.com.

About Post Author

Professor Mike

Professor Mike is a left-leaning, dog loving, political junkie. He has written dozens of articles for Substack, Medium, Simily, and Tribel. Professor Mike has been published at Smerconish.com, among others. He is a strong proponent of the environment, and a passionate protector of animals. In addition he is a fierce anti-Trumper. Take a moment and share his work.

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