Arctic ice is melting and the climate is changing. And although these aren’t new ideas, the speed at which it’s happening is.
“It’s happening much faster than our most pessimistic projections,” Arctic scientist David Barber told the CBC.
Barber is a professor at the University of Manitoba and the lead researcher of the Circumpolar Flaw Lead (CFL) System Study — the largest Arctic study conducted during the latest International Polar Year.
Wolverine is in trouble, and it’s not because of the comic book super villain Magneto. A new study in the journal,Population Ecology, shows Canada’s melting snow pack habitats are crushing wolverine populations — the first land species proven to be dwindling because of melting snow.
“In provinces where winter snow pack levels are declining fastest, wolverine populations tend to be declining most rapidly,” wrote researchers.
You can find wolverines in boreal forests throughout Canada, but they also live in Scandinavia, Russia, China, and Mongolia. And although they're sometimes playful, like this wolverine practicing his drumming, they're also vicious predators. They've been known to take down moose and face off against wolf packs or grizzly bears over a meal.
In the east, Canada’s wolverines are already endangered, but in the west the feds only list them as a special concern species, reports the Ottawa Citizen.
The new study compares records of wolverines caught by trappers between 1968 and 2004, and charts the data along side snow pack data from the same period.
Dr Jedediah Brodie of the University of Montana, who co-authored the study, told the BBC that he can’t be sure why their numbers are declining, but he hazarded some guesses to why wolverines depend on deep snow.
Deep snow is used for wolverine populations to spread out. When the kids are ready to go off on their own, they use tracts of deep snow as highways to their own territory.
They also depend on deep snow for food, since harsh winters with deep snow naturally kill more moose, elk, deer and caribou for the wolverines to scavenge.
We’re losing the tall-grass. The symbol of the Canadian Prairies, those 8-foot-tall kings of the grass species are almost gone.
Tall grasses used to cover the prairies all the way down to Kansas. Now they're part of the most endangered land ecosystem in the world, having lost 97.5 percent of their habitat.
When researchers surveyed the Manitoba tall-grass habitat in the 1980’s, the results were bleak for species dependent on the ecosystem. But in a new study University of Manitoba researchers found the future looks even darker.
Released mid-January, the study, compared data from the 1980’s with current numbers and found that Manitoba has lost more tall-grass than any other state or province. This is particularly disturbing since the province used to boast almost all of Canada’s tall-grass. But since the 1980’s, 37 percent of the ecosystem has vanished.
The most startling find was that we might not be able to get the tall-grass back. Twenty-one hectares is the threshold, and patches that have deteriorated lower than that or disappeared cannot be revived.
Most of the remaining tall-grass today lies in Kansas, where the state's chapter of The Nature Conservancy works to keep it thriving.
Surprisingly, the Nature Conservancy is also responsible for preserving much of the tall-grass left in Manitoba too.
For an even more amazing video of what designers can do when faced with a particularly sticky problem requiring an eco-answer, check out this foldable apartment in Hong Kong.
