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Editorial: Climate threat to marmots

Just when the finish line was in sight, the Friends of Strathcona Park face another hurdle as they try to save the Vancouver Island marmot from extinction.

Just when the finish line was in sight, the Friends of Strathcona Park face another hurdle as they try to save the Vancouver Island marmot from extinction. This time, it’s a study from the University of Victoria that says Strathcona Provincial Park will feel the effects of climate change more than any other B.C. park over the next 50 years. The face of the park will change, the study says, and one casualty will be the heather alpine meadows where marmots live.

The marmots, only 250 of which survive in the wild, are only the most familiar potential victims of the changes that will sweep across B.C.’s wilderness, transforming the landscape and forcing us to rethink how we preserve the province’s ecosystems.

For most of us, parks are places to relax and marvel at the wonders of nature. But there is much more to them.

One of the purposes of parks and other protected areas is to preserve representative parts of each of the province’s different ecosystems. The study suggests that over the next five decades, many of those ecosystems will change, so we’re no longer protecting what we intended.

The researchers used satellite maps and climate-change models to try to predict the effect that climate change would have. They looked at three indicators: greenness, seasonality and minimum cover.

The greener an area is, the more productive it is and the more species it supports. Seasonality measures the difference in plant growth between summer and winter; higher areas and those with snow tend to see most growth in the summertime. Regions with higher minimum cover have more productivity and more year-round food.

Strathcona Park has a dry mountain ecosystem, but the study suggests that in 50 years, its minimum cover will increase dramatically and it will become more of a coastal rainforest.

While that sounds good for many plants and animals, it will push the treeline higher, wiping out the meadows where the marmots live.

Overall, the researchers predict that the province will become greener, with greater minimum cover. The differences between seasons will become less noticeable. The wilderness will generally become more homogenous.

In the Okanagan, on the other hand, things could become drier and dry forests could move north.

For many species, change will be a boon. For northern woodland caribou in Omineca Provincial Park, however, it will shrink the areas they need to safely produce their calves.

The researchers suggest that we might have to rethink the idea of using parks to preserve representative areas, or change our planning system to follow the transformation.

The predicted changes in our wilderness areas are just one more example of the growing list of things that climate scientists say will force us to adapt to a new environment. Some of the changes will be positive; others will be negative.

Warmer temperatures are a major cause of the devastating march of the mountain pine beetle; wildfires in the U.S. are burning an average of twice as much forest each year as they did 40 years ago; rain-fed agricultural productivity could increase by five to 20 per cent in some areas; the snowpack will shrink; heat waves will happen more often and be more intense.

The marmot’s human friends, who have already worked so hard to save the animals from extinction, face an even harder task.