AMonthlyNewsletterofEnvironmentalScienceandPolicy. VolumeTenNumberThree March 2003 CONTENTS: SNOW LEOPARD CONSERVATION ThomasMcCarthy

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1 AMonthlyNewsletterofEnvironmentalScienceandPolicy VolumeTenNumberThree Snow Leopard Conservation Introduction: Snow leopards live in the wildest regions of Asia, from Mongolia and Siberia in the north to Pakistan and Myanmar in the south. They live in such remote areas and are so stealthy that it's difficult to even guess how many there are. The best estimate is that there are 3,500 to 7,000 snow leopards living in the wild. It is ironic that the success in protecting tigers from the Asian traditional medicine market has put more pressure on snow leopards. Tiger bones are highly prized in traditional medicine and a recent report has a complete snow leopard skeleton fetching $10,000 on the black market in Kyrgyzstan. We spoke with Thomas McCarthy of the International Snow Leopard Trust about his work on the natural history of snow leopards and some of the programs the Trust is developing to protect them in the wild. ER: Dr. McCarthy, what is your training? TM: I worked for about fifteen years as a wildlife biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. I did both research and management on large carnivores, mostly with bears. ER: Grizzlies? CONTENTS: SNOW LEOPARD CONSERVATION ThomasMcCarthy FINGERPRINTS OF GLOBALWARMING ONWILDANIMALS AND PLANTS TerryRoot TM: Both grizzly and black bear. I did my master s research on grizzly bear food habits and foraging strategies in southeast Alaska, but I was interested in doing Ph.D. work overseas. I had a friend that s a wildlife filmmaker from Alaska, and he was in Mongolia to film George Schaller doing some of the early snow leopard work there. I sent a letter over with him and just asked what projects in Asia might I get involved with, particularly bears, to do a Ph.D. He wrote back and said it s tough to break into that over there, but he did have this snow leopard project that is going to need a leader eventually. I went to Mongolia for the first time in 1992 for three months and we put a radio collar on a female snow leopard to get the project started. Then I came back and set up my Ph.D. program through the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I thought it was going to be threeyear study to get a Ph.D. but snow leopards are secretive and so difficult to study that it ended up taking over six years. At the end of the Ph.D. in 2000, I assumed that my work with snow leopards was going to be over because there s so little opportunity to work with them. ER: You had worked with them already hadn't you? TM: I had been loosely affiliated with the International Snow Leopard Trust here in Seattle over the years and they had helped support my project in various ways, but they already had a conservation director. He decided to move on and form his own organization, so there was suddenly a snow leopard position open here, which broadened my horizons to doing more conservation work throughout Asia on the species and not just in Mongolia. It didn t take me long to accept that job and I have been with them just over two years. ER: How did the Trust get started? TM: The Snow Leopard Trust is just over twenty years old now. The Trust was started by a visionary woman named Helen Freeman. She was one of the first education directors for the Woodland Park Zoo here in Seattle, and she did an early study on the first two snow leopards that they had at the zoo. It was during that time that she

2 decided we ve got to be doing more for them in the wild than is currently going on, so she formed the International Snow Leopard Trust. The Snow Leopard Trust has programs in five different snow leopard range countries: Mongolia, Pakistan, India, Kyrgyzstan, and China. We only have four full-time staff here in the U.S., but we have nineteen full-time staff in our range countries. We hire only local range country people. We ve got biologists doing both research and monitoring as well as designing and implementing conservation programs in each of those countries. Our focus is to work with local people that live in snow leopard habitat. We believe that the best way to conserve the snow leopard is through communitybased conservation where both the people who live with snow leopards as well as the animals benefit. That s the way we ve worked most of our conservation programs. We ve been working with more than sixty snow leopard experts which is essentially all the snow leopard experts around the world to bring together their ideas on the most pressing conservation and research needs. That culminated in a summit meeting here in Seattle last May that brought sixty-three people here, about forty from snow leopard range countries. ER: What came of that meeting? TM: One result of that meeting is to take the snow leopard survival strategy to each of the range countries and help them develop conservation plans. China, which has the most snow leopards and the most habitat, asked us to help implement action planning there. ER: What do we know about their biology? The snow leopards, not the Chinese. TM: We know snow leopards breed every couple years. They produce anywhere from one to five cubs, most commonly two or three. The cubs stay with the females for a year and a half and then the female breeds again. We have no idea of cub survival rates in the wild. We don t have any idea of dispersal, where they go, how far they go. That s an important question for us in Kyrgyzstan for instance because we estimate there were 600 leopards there ten years ago, and 300 hides have gone out of the country. Does that mean we only have 300 leopards left? Probably not, because some of them are going to be replaced by cubs. But if you don t have any idea of cub survival rate, you can t tell what the attrition is. Those questions we d like to be able to answer, but with an animal as secretive as the snow leopard it s difficult. Dispersal is going to be a little bit tougher question than survival. We could do more radio-collaring studies in the future. Right now we re more concerned about snow leopard relationships with their prey, and actual numbers of snow leopards. We don t have enough information on where snow leopards even occur. We ve developed a range map that shows two and a half million square kilometers of habitat, but a lot of that is based on computerized habitat models that indicate that certain areas would be a good place for a snow leopard based on slope, ruggedness and other habitat features. Probably about 90 percent of that has never been ground-truthed. We think we know where snow leopards occur, but within those areas we don t know what population levels are. The Environmental Review (ISSN X) is published the first business day of each month. Address correspondence to 6920 Roosevelt Way N.E. PMB 307, Seattle, WA Copyright 2002 by the Environmental Review. Douglas P. Taylor, Publisher. Domestic subscriptions (12 issues) $25.00 in U.S. currency. For Canada and Mexico add $ All other foreign add $ Teachers, students, and seniors in the U.S. may subscribe for $15.00 per year. subscription is free. Change of address: allow 4 weeks, giving old and new address. dtaylor@igc.apc.org - Web site URL = 2

3 Some of these bigger issues are what we have to address first. Our biggest research questions are to find out where snow leopards occur, where they are most dense, where the important populations are and what the populations are doing. ER: Where do they live? TM: Snow leopards occur in twelve different countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, most of the former Soviet Republics, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and in Russia in southern Siberia; and Mongolia, China, India, Nepal, and Bhutan. It possibly also occurs in northern Myanmar Burma but that s never been confirmed. Snow leopards occur over about two and a half million square kilometers of habitat, but they re sparsely distributed within that. Some of the earliest extensive research was done in the early 1980s by Rodney Jackson, who was my predecessor here at the Trust as conservation director. He did the first radio collaring of a snow leopard in the early 1980s in Nepal and had six cats on the air during his study period there. He learned a fair bit about what they eat, how big their home ranges are, how they interact with each other, and how they interact with other animals, including humans. But using ground-based telemetry trying to track an animal like a snow leopard through the mountains of the Himalayas, he realized there was a lot he was missing about how large snow leopard home ranges were and seasonal differences in their ranges. He had to leave his study area for several months at a time during the monsoon. So even A snow leopard hide on display in a market. All images courtesy of the Snow Leopard Trust. though it was a first study, and it was a good one, we were still left with a lot of unanswered questions about snow leopards. There have been a couple small studies since then where researchers used radio collars but the next large scale study of snow leopard using and radio collars was my own in the early 1990s. We had five different cats on the air, and again we were having trouble keeping up with the cats using groundbased VHF telemetry, which is where the collar has to be more or less in your line of sight to hear the signal from the cat. I was working in the Altai Mountains where they meet the Great Gobi Desert in southwest Mongolia and had arbitrarily sketched out a 450-squarekilometer study area thinking that would be an adequate-sized study area to encompass the home ranges of several snow leopards. ER: You thought that would be enough area for quite a few cats. TM: Rod Jackson had found that snow leopards only range over between fifteen and sixty square kilometers of home range in Nepal, so I thought maybe we could keep up with them in the Altai but I was losing my cats for several months at a time, so I knew that we weren t getting a true depiction of what snow leopards were doing there. About that time the technology changed and we were able to use satellite radio collars. But we only captured one more cat to put that on, a female who should have had a fairly small home range. This new technology quickly showed us what was wrong with our VHF telemetry. This cat was ranging over more than 1000 square kilometers, so this changed our thinking on snow leopard home-range size substantially. ER: Would you expect males to have larger ranges? TM: In some cats that s the case. It s likely they re similar in size if not larger. The males that I collared had home ranges of up to 400 square kilometers as determined using groundbased telemetry but I know I missed a lot of their movements. I don t know how much of their home range we 3

4 failed to determine, but I imagine we missed a substantial part of it. ER: How does Nepal compare to Mongolia? TM: In Nepal the food base is much better for snow leopards than it is in Mongolia where the food is sparse. The primary food for snow leopards is large mountain ungulates like blue sheep, ibex, argali, and markhor. In Mongolia their main prey is ibex, and the populations there are quite small compared to Nepal, which means that snow leopards are going to need a much larger home range to find enough prey to live on. ER: How big is a snow leopard? TM: Snow leopards are not all that big actually. They re considered one of the great cats but the biggest male I ever captured was ninety-five pounds. They re quite a bit smaller than a cougar but they still need to take a large sheep or goat every couple weeks. ER: How big is an adult female? TM: We had a few that were in the seventy-five to eighty-five pound range, so not too much smaller than the males. In captivity they might get up to as high as 125 pounds for a male, but I think that might be a bit artificial because they are less active and get fed all they need. ER: How long do they live? TM: Snow leopards can live up to twenty years. One of our cats in Mongolia was probably in the poorest condition of all the cats I d ever seen and was beat up pretty badly and approaching the end of her life. When she did die I was able to extract a tooth and age her by counting the rings in the teeth and she was thirteen years old. In the wild I m guessing they don t live a whole lot longer than that. ER: How was she beat up? TM: She had a number of holes in her ears. She was missing most of one ear, missing a couple toes off one paw, broken canine teeth, a split lip, and some old wounds on her head. All of these were old wounds, so it s hard to know if it was from interaction with a wolf or a pack of wolves, their ranges overlap there in Mongolia, or if she had interacted with another snow leopard. Snow leopards are solitary animals but they don t have exclusive home ranges. Their home ranges overlap substantially and they move around within their home ranges like an elaborate dance. One marks in one area and another cat shows up and marks, so the first cat moves. Supposedly you shouldn t get that aggressive interaction if these cats are paying attention to marking patterns, so that s why I couldn t tell what had happened to her, if it was wolf or cat. It could have even been a domestic dog because there are a lot of herders up in the area where I was working. They have dogs and one or more of them might have caught her. ER: How do you observe them in the wild? TM: One of the reasons that we have been able to monitor them to the degree that we have is because of that social marking that they do. Snow leopards are difficult to see in the wild. I have had my radio-collared cats standing on a barren hillside 100 to 150 meters away, and I m sitting there with binoculars and my associate s got a telescope and we can tell from her collar signal that she s moving across that hillside right in front of us, and we don t see them. You think of a snow leopard as this big white cat with black spots. How hard can that be to see out on a dusty hillside? ER: It s well camouflaged. TM: It is such incredible camouflage that you never see these guys even when you know where they are. There s not much way to monitor leopards visually, so we have learned to rely on their sign to monitor them. In the late eighties and early nineties we developed the Snow 4

5 The Environmental Review Website is now located at In the coming months it will contain a complete archive of all back issues dating back to The archive will be searchable and available free to the public. Leopard Information Management System (SLIMS) in which we have trained people throughout snow leopard range to use a standardized methodology of walking transects through snow leopard habitat and looking for the sign that they leave for each other. ER: What do they leave for sign? TM: Primarily scrapes, which are small depressions they make in the soil by scraping their back feet; often they urinate on that. They also leave scent sprays on rocks and overhanging boulders, and then there is also feces. We look for those different types of sign while we walk milelong transects in various parts of their range. By looking at the numbers of snow leopard sign we can estimate the relative density of snow leopards there compared to another transect. It s our way of finding out first if snow leopards occur in an area, and if so, how dense a population might be. It s also helped us identify areas that are suitable for conservation. If you walk the same transects time after time and year after year, then you can look at changes in sign density and you can assume that indicates whether snow leopard numbers are going up or down. We combine that with visual observations, surveys, and counts of snow leopard food animals, the ibex, argali, and Marco Polo sheep. By those methodologies we can get a better idea of what s happening with snow leopards in different parts of their A Mongolian woman with a bag of wool ready for market. range. ER: Can you identify individual animals from their sign? TM: It hasn t been easy to do up until now but we're working on new noninvasive techniques which are going to be looking at both hair and also individual scent. We re going to have a research project collaborating with the University of Washington this year to look at the use of dogs to identify individual animals from their scent. With camera trapping you can identify animals from the spot patterns on their coat, and you can use genetic methodologies as well. When snow leopards leave their sign, they often cheek rub against a boulder and that pulls out a couple little hairs. If you ve got a follicle on the hair, then you can do a DNA analysis to identify an individual. That s more expensive than camera trapping, but it s also more accurate. With the three of those methodologies we re going to have a much easier, less stressful, and less costly way of assessing the number of snow leopards in any given area than with capture and radio collaring. We re excited about all three of those, and our organization and a couple of others are exploring all of those right now and how they ll work for snow leopards. We just did a camera trapping in India, both our organization and Rod Jackson s, and it s proven pretty successful. We just had a set of three cameras out in the Zanskar Valley in 5

6 Ladakh India, in January of 2002 and in a couple of weeks we got photographs of four or five different snow leopards and some thirty individual photos, so the technique has potential. Combining that with some genetic analyses we ll be able to get a much better picture of how many animals we have in any given area. ER: Snow leopard density is going to change according to how good or bad the habitat is for them. TM: Right. There are some areas that are much better than others within the range. We estimate there are 3,500 to 7,000 snow leopards left in the wild, and that s a pretty broad spread. It is a scientifically based wild guess and where the number lies within that range is hard to tell. ER: How does that compare to their historical numbers or range? Has it contracted or is there any way to know? TM: It s hard to know because so little research has been done on snow leopards. We do know that they used to occur in several areas where they no longer occur. Within any given area we don t know what the population trajectory is, whether it s going up or down. There are areas where snow leopards used to occur up in the northern part of Mongolia on the border with Russia and they are no longer there. I ve surveyed most of snow leopard range in Mongolia just to get an idea of range extent and establish a baseline so that we can monitor populations in the future. Some places where people said snow leopards have always occurred we find no sign of them at all, so we know that they have been extirpated from some areas. The thing of most concern right now are some of the former Soviet republics. Kyrgyzstan in particular seems to have been a hotbed for poaching. We think there were 600 to 700 snow leopards in the country ten years ago, and our best estimate is that 50 percent of that has left the country as pelts or bones. ER: Bones? TM: Bones are a highly sought after commodity on the traditional Asian medical market. Ironically, the better the job that conservationists have done to eliminate the tiger bone trade, the more that market is turning to alternative bones, and that includes snow leopards. We found out about a year ago that somebody paid close to $10,000 for one full set of snow leopard bones. When you re working with herders whose monthly income might be fifteen dollars, $200 or $300 for a set of snow leopard bones is a real temptation. They re not going to get the $10,000, that s on the upper end of the black market but even at $300, you re talking two year s of income to poach and sell one animal. In Kyrgyzstan one of the problems is that with the collapse of the Soviet system, in many of the national parks in fact parks that were just created several years ago to protect snow leopards the rangers in those parks have no salary and no way to live. Instead of protecting those animals, they re now the poachers. They re sending the bones to China; they re sending the pelts to Eastern Europe. In Kyrgyzstan we may have lost up to half of the population in the last ten years. I don t think that s an isolated occurrence in many of those former Soviet republics. We just don t have the information on a number of the others. ER: How are they doing in Afghanistan? TM: We re getting a lot of information now out of Afghanistan. With the events that have happened there recently, people needing income, people needing food, snow leopards are losing a lot of the food there as far as the ibex and wild sheep because the people are taking them to eat. Also, 6

7 they re looking at the snow leopard as a source of income. It s unfortunate that so many Westerners in the country right now, military personnel, aid workers, and others, are apparently not aware that the snow leopard is a protected species and it s on CITES [International Convention on Trade in Endangered Species. Ed.]. Taking one of the pelts back to the USA for instance could get you a $25,000 fine and three years in jail. But we understand these things are being sold fairly openly on black markets in Afghanistan. I don t think all those pelts are coming from Afghanistan, because there probably aren t all that many leopards there. This stuff has to be flowing across the border there. It will be at the porous borders with Tajikistan and Pakistan. There are other areas where we feel fairly confident that snow leopard populations are stable and in some areas they might even be increasing. Areas that we ve got good conservation programs in now are Mongolia and northern India, but in other range states there are some areas that give us reason for a lot of concern right now. ER: What did you learn from your study in Mongolia? TM: As the study started to wind down, we moved from research into conservation because we felt we had learned a lot more about the cats. Besides the large home ranges, we found some amazing facts. For instance, snow leopards will cross large expanses of open desert and open steppe to get from one mountain range to another. We ve seen cats cross more than sixty kilometers of open desert, right down on the edge of the Gobi. This was not documented before. Researchers measuring a wild snow leopard. We ve had some of our collared cats do that and we have figured out that a number of other cats have done it from the sign left across the desert. ER: If they're so secretive, how do they interact with people? TM: One of the things that we learned there was the strong interaction between humans and snow leopards. In Mongolia 60 percent of the people are still nomadic pastoralist or seminomadic pastoralist. Snow leopards eat their livestock, and their entire life is bound up in their livestock. It s their food source, it s their clothing source, and they use the wool to make the felt for their homes, their yurts. Essentially their livestock is their whole bank account. When you ve got an animal coming down and withdrawing anywhere from 1 percent to 5 percent of your bank account every year it s a serious consideration, especially when those people live so close to the edge anyway. We realized in Mongolia that if we were going to make a difference in snow leopard conservation we were going to have to work with the local people to find a way to alleviate these losses so that they could learn to live with the cats. My wife Priscilla and I (mostly she) went into the mountains and did many interviews with the herders. She spent several months living among them learning about their lives and asking them if there was anything somebody could do to make their life better? Quite commonly they would tell us that they have no access to markets. They have products from their livestock (mostly wool) and they have lots of camel, lots of sheep, lots of cashmere goats, and they were getting pennies per kilo for this from passing traders that would then take it into China. They had a handicraft tradition there where they knitted and felted, so we said, What if we were to train you a little bit to enhance these handicrafts and then market them for you? At first we marketed them in the capital of Mongolia in Ulannbaatar to the tourist trade. Now we ve started marketing these through our own Website. We sell them here in our Seattle office and we 7

8 sell them in a number of zoo stores in the U.S. as well as in England. This is bringing in thousands of dollars to local people in Mongolia that live in snow leopard habitat. Each family that works with us there now signs a contract that says they will make these handicrafts and we will provide them additional training and any of the tools they need and then we will market those. In exchange they will tolerate the few losses to snow leopards that they have each year, they will not kill any leopards and they will not kill any of the natural prey of the leopards, the ibex and argali. We re running this program in thirteen sites in Mongolia. It s been going for over three years, and it s a popular program there now. To our knowledge we ve not had a snow leopard killed in any of our project sites. There s a lot of peer pressure because if anybody in the community kills a snow leopard or kills an ibex then the entire community loses the 20 percent cash bonus that they would have received at the end of the year. One community did kill an ibex one year and they lost their bonus and they weren t pleased about that or with the person that did it, so the peer pressure plays in well. ER: It s a fairly tightly knit community then. TM: It is. Most of our sites in Mongolia are in association with national parks or protected areas, so the rangers from those parks work with the local people. We try to run the program through the national park so it looks like the money is coming from the park. It fosters a much better relationship between local people and parks, and both sides start understanding the needs of the other. This is a program that my wife Priscilla and I formed several years ago, but when we came to the Trust we brought that program with us. It s now an important program within our organization, and we re expanding it this year to India. We are already operational in Kyrgyzstan, and we ll have a program up and running in Pakistan this year as well. It s been successful and we think we can export the model. It s got to be tweaked a little bit everywhere you take it because the conservation issues and the cultures are slightly different in each country. One of the things we learned when We estimate there were 600 snow leopards in Kyrgyzstan ten years ago, and 300 hides have gone out of the country since then. we were formulating the snow leopard survival strategy is that the threats and the appropriate conservation actions are very different between countries, or in a place as large as China, within the country. You have to tailor these programs, but you have to go in and do a participatory rural appraisal and determined the conservation concerns are for wildlife and for the local community, what the needs are, what they have as far as skills. Each program is tailored to that. ER: This is becoming a theme in conservation biology. TM: Right. We called this program Irbis Enterprises Irbis means snow leopard in Mongolian where it was started we ve now renamed it Snow Leopard Enterprises because the programs are more widespread. It s getting some accolades from the 8 conservation community because as a model program it takes into account the problems faced by the local communities in regards to wildlife conflicts. We asked the people what their needs, desires, and strengths are, and from that we tried to get a benefit directly to the local people in exchange for conservation. It s to Priscilla s great credit that she thought this up and implemented it. ER: How do conservation problems differ in the different range countries? TM: In Kyrgyzstan the problem is not so much killing a snow leopard in retribution for livestock loss, there it s mostly poaching for money because the people are hurting economically and have little or no income. It s a little different when we go into a community like that and say, We ll sell your knitted hats and gloves and your felted floor mats, and each family will bring in a couple hundred dollars a year. They re looking at you and thinking Yes, but we can have $500 for one snow leopard skin. You have to go about it differently and a lot of education is involved, but we re making headway. ER: What motivation could you offer? TM: That s a good question but they understand that snow leopards are a limited commodity. They can go out there and take the few that they have left, and then they have nothing after that. So we re also suggesting the value of a snow leopard in terms of ecotourism. People will pay a lot just to see snow leopard sign, or know they are visiting a place were snow leopards simply occur.

9 We re also looking at hunting programs for the large sheep and goats, which is a lucrative business. One argali or Marco Polo sheep hunt in Kyrgyzstan can net the government $40,000 to $50,000. What we hope to do is initiate hunting programs where a substantial part of that income goes to the local people. Again, it will be in exchange for a conservation commitment in a contract. This is working quite well in Pakistan where WWF and other organizations took the lead on this type of community conservation incentive program. In Pakistan they do surveys and determine how many bighorn animals can be harvested comfortably in any given year, and then the permits for those are sold. Anywhere from 70 to 80 percent of the income of that goes directly into the local community where they use it for schools, hospitals, wells, or for any needs that they define. ER: That sounds like not as tough a problem as it seemed at first. TM: It still is because now we ve got to go in to the Kyrgyz government for instance and say, Would you kindly relinquish about 50 percent of what you re currently making off this and put it in the pockets of the local people? That s a tough one, but that s part of the conservation planning that we re addressing in the Snow Leopard Survival Strategy. One of the other things we re investigating is how to stem the losses of livestock at the source. If we can help people protect their livestock better, then we don t have the problem in the beginning. Rod Jackson pioneered a predatorproof corral that they ve tested and set up in a number of places in Ladakh in northern India as well as Nepal. If people just leave their livestock out all night, they re easy prey for both snow leopards and wolves. With these predator-proof corrals, which the community designs and builds, they can keep their livestock in at night and cut down on their losses. We re looking at expanding that into Pakistan this year as well. They ve had success with various guard dog breeds for cheetah conservation in Africa, so we ve been talking to them about maybe exporting some of those dogs into Pakistan or maybe even Mongolia as a test project to see if they The primary food for snow leopards is large mountain ungulates like blue sheep, ibex, argali, and markhor. might help reduce losses of livestock to snow leopards. It s a completely different terrain and different cat but they re supposed to be good dogs for that type of terrain. ER: Doesn t that put the problem back on the snow leopard? If you make it harder for them to take livestock is there something in the wild for them to shift over to? TM: Right. That s another conservation concern. One of the key issues that was listed among those sixty-four people that attended our Snow Leopard Survival Summit last May, is the loss of natural prey. We know wild ungulate numbers are declining across much of the range due to both legal and illegal hunting. So, if we install predator-proof corrals, and you suddenly take away livestock as a source of food, is there enough natural prey in the wild, like ungulates and marmots, to maintain that snow leopard population? In most cases I would probably have to say yes. We re talking about putting a hunting program in Kyrgyzstan that would benefit local people, but one of the problems with many of these hunting programs is they are poorly monitored for the impact on the wild ungulates. In many cases I think the income from hunting is so great that resource managers and government officials talk themselves into believing they have a much larger huntable population out there than probably exists. In the end populations decline rapidly, revenues decline for government, and snow leopards and other natural predators suffer. Another issue right now, and it s a vicious cycle, is competition between wild sheep and goats and livestock. If you bring more livestock to graze in the mountains, that reduces the food for the wild ungulates, their numbers then decline and then there s less natural prey for snow leopards, and so they turn to the domestic livestock for survival and then you get retribution killing of the snow leopards. What happens if we take livestock out of the loop? Are we doing more damage than good? That s where you have to assess the situation in each area and figure out what your best conservation tool is. That s why you can t just go in and say a program worked in a valley in Mongolia therefore it ll work in northern Pakistan, because it may well not. ER: Comparing it to our mountain lion it seems like the biggest thing would be to stop persecuting them. If you give 9

10 them half a chance they ll find a way to keep going. TM: I think that s probably true with the snow leopard. If we could stem the retribution killing for livestock losses, that would be a big start, but that s a concern in maybe 60 percent of their range. In other areas it is just economics, so if we reduce poverty there might be much less pressure on the cats for their fur and bones. We worry less about habitat loss in snow leopard range because it is so remote. You don t have industry going in there in a large way. You get the occasional road. You might have an oil pipeline through part of it in some of the former Soviet Republics and China, but for the most part that s not what causes habitat loss for snow leopards. It s habitat quality that goes down when you put more and more domestic livestock up there. So controlling livestock is going to be a key issue and then controlling the illegal and legal hunting of their prey. If you could take care of those, snow leopards could probably take care of themselves. In a number of cases they are taking care of themselves anyway because the habitat is so remote. There are still areas where there are no or few people, so I think we re always going to have pockets of snow leopards even though those pockets are getting more fragmented. But I think they can take care of themselves if we could just remove a couple of the pressures on them now. But those are big pressures, and they re economically based in a part of the world where people have a hard time putting food on the table already. The International Snow Leopard Trust Website address is Fingerprints of Global Warming on Wild Animals and Plants Introduction: Our understanding of global warming is gradually improving. After careful study the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a consortium of over 2,000 scientists, has concluded that the average temperature of the world has gone up one degree Fahrenheit in the last 100 years and it is expected to increase rapidly. This warming is greater in higher latitudes. Alaska and northern Canada have seen average temperatures increase five degrees. As Paul Ehrlich pointed out in last month's ER, people rely on ecosystem services for their health and well being. Ecosystems provide us with clean air and water, flood and climate control, crop pollination and pest control the list is a long one. Ecosystems are flexible and have changed in the past but climate hasn't changed this fast since the last Ice Age, and humans have fragmented the landscape. Elk have to cross farms, fences and roads; salmon have to pass dams; migratory birds have to contend with cities and airports. Many species will adapt to the new order, but many will not. In the January 2003 Nature two separate groups of scientists reported that there is now credible evidence that plants and animals have been responding to global warming 1,2. We discussed this with one of the authors, Terry Root. ER: Professor Root, what is your training? TR: I did my undergraduate degree at the University of New Mexico in math and statistics, and then I worked as a scientific programmer on the Voyager project that went out to Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. For that job I was working at the University of Colorado where each semester I could take a class for free. The class I took required that I do a project and I found out that there was a man who had bird data computerized. I got those data and started playing around with them. I got completely hooked and ended up deciding that I wanted to do my Master s Degree in biology at the University of Colorado. Then I did my Ph.D. with Bob May at Princeton on how environmental factors temperature, precipitation, humidity shape the ranges of different birds in the wintertime. I did my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan in physiological ecology working with Bill Dawson. At about the same time I was offered an assistant professorship at Michigan, so after a short postdoc I took the job at Michigan and was there for fourteen years. Then I moved to Stanford where I m on the faculty as a senior fellow. I m working on how global warming affects plants and animals; that s what the Nature paper was about. 10

11 ER: Before we get into the Nature paper let s talk a little bit about global warming. TR: Regardless of what George Bush is saying, the globe is warming. It has warmed about one degree Fahrenheit on average in the last 100 years. The way we know that is we ve got thermometers around the planet and we also have satellite data. In 1995 the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) said that there is a discernible impact of humans on climate. What that is suggesting then is that this increase in our global temperature is indeed due to humans. The thing that I was interested in was not whether humans caused the warming; I wanted to know if that one degree of warming was affecting plants and animals. I didn t think that there was going to be that strong of a signal, and I thought that it would be pretty difficult to see if plants and animals are being affected. I was surprised. It turned out that plants and animals are strongly affected by global warming. ER: How did you sort that out? TR: We found four different patterns. The first pattern is that species are migrating back in the spring or flowers are blooming in the spring an average of five days earlier per decade over the last three decades. For the last thirty years then, flowers are blooming earlier or birds are arriving earlier by about fifteen days. ER: That s something a person could notice in their lifetime. TR: That s right. The second pattern that we found is that species are moving north in the Northern Hemisphere and south in the Southern Hemisphere; and they re moving up in elevation. They re tracking this warming and as it gets warmer they move closer to the poles or higher in elevation. The third pattern that we found is a shift in the abundance of species. In a location where there used to be a high number of a particular species, it has shifted, in most cases it has shifted north in the Northern Hemisphere. The last category is a catchall category: morphological traits in species have changed: egg sizes and body sizes have changed in response to the warming. Also, there have been genetic changes in several insect species. Those are the four patterns that we found. For the last thirty years, flowers are blooming earlier, birds are arriving earlier by about fifteen days. ER: Most people aren t going to be impressed by a one-degree Fahrenheit change in average temperatures. To our senses a one-degree temperature is nothing. TR: That s true but you need to remember that one degree of warming is a global average. At the higher latitudes there has been much more warming than there has been nearer the Equator. In Alaska for instance, there has been a five to seven-degree warming over the same time. That is something you can notice. The permafrost is melting and houses are tilting because of the permafrost underneath them are melting. ER: And glaciers are shrinking. TR: Glaciers around the globe are shrinking. In Canada you can notice the warming but where I am here in Stanford, California it is harder to notice it. What you do notice all around the globe are the extreme events. When the globe warms it doesn t warm gently, instead there s an increase in extreme events. So we ll have days when the temperature is over 100 degrees in Chicago more often for example, and unusually heavy snowstorms in the Northeast. ER: Is that what is predicted or what is actually occurring? TR: Both. We ve had warm snaps in Chicago and there have been increased human deaths because of that, and the same thing has gone on in Los Angeles and in Phoenix. Extreme events are happening more frequently. ER: What s the physical explanation for that? TR: The land mass is warming more quickly than the oceans so there s an imbalance between the temperature of the ocean and the temperature of the land, which causes climatological disturbances. ER: My idea was that there is just more energy in the system, it s warmer. I don t know if that s valid or not. TR: That certainly is valid when you talk about the strength of hurricanes. We don t know if the number of hurricanes is going to change but we do know that the strength of hurricanes is going to increase. The water is warmer, and the temperature of the water helps determine the strength of the storm. 11

12 ER: What makes IPCC report on climate change the gold standard? There were hundreds of scientists working on different parts of it. TR: There were about 2,000 scientists from around the world working on it. The governments around the world requested that scientists find the best science about climate change and report on those findings. For that report we looked at all of the studies that had been published on climate change. We summarized that information and we wrote it all up, and we sent it out for review to correct any mistakes. Anybody could review it, not just scientists, and when we got those reviews back we had an obligation to address all of the reviews. ER: It s not a peer review? It s a freefor-all? TR: It was a free-for-all, and also a peer review because we insisted that there had to be a certain number of scientists in the field review it, but governments and contrarians like those at the Cato Institute can review it too. [The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank. Ed.] We incorporated comments that we felt were appropriate, addressed those that we didn t, and then we sent it back out for further review. When we got it back we then put it into a final draft, and presented it to all of the governments as a final document. ER: That s a lot of collaboration. TR: Yes, which makes it pretty exciting because you have all these scientists from all over the world that you d never meet otherwise. It s wonderful. ER: Were you aware that this group in Texas was working on the same general idea that you were for your Nature paper? TR: Yes. Camille Parmesan and Gary Yohe were on the IPCC with me and we had talked quite a bit. Camille worked on the IPCC chapter about methods to use to look for the changes in animals and plants. That s why her and Gary s article is focusing on a new type of method to analyze the data. ER: Was there a sense of competition or race to publish between the labs? TR: No. Our desire is to get people to understand that global warming is happening. The more ways that is done the better. ER: Was it a coincidence both papers came out in the same week? TR: Yes as far as I know. Nature may have had something to do with that, but I don t know. They both came out simultaneously and I think because of that people took more note than they might have otherwise. ER: And your conclusions were in agreement. TR: That s right. We used different types of data. Some of the studies that we included were the same, but others were not. She used a different method of analyzing the data than we did, and we came up with roughly the same answer. That was pretty surprising but shows how robust the results of the studies are. ER: How many scientific papers did you look at for your study? The Environmental Review newsletter is a low cost, high quality resource for students, teachers, libraries, or anyone interested in the environment. subscriptions in Adobe pdf format are free. Call 206/523/2501 or write us at 6920 Roosevelt Way NE, PMB 307, Seattle, WA or us at dtaylor@igc.apc.org TR: We started out with about 3,000 studies that mention climate and either plants or animals, and we pared all of that down based on certain strict criteria to 143 papers. There was one neat study by a daughter and son of Aldo Leopold. Their study was so much fun, and I got to talk to Nina and Carl. I felt like this is what science is about. In the spring, their father methodically recorded at what they called the shack when flowers first bloomed and when birds would return or when the frogs would start calling. Then Nina resumed that recording. She, Carl and a statistician analyzed the data and found that the various species are responding significantly earlier recently than back to the 1940s 3. ER: This was in Wisconsin at the Sand County shack? TR: That s right. It s fairly high latitude, so there was a nice strong 12

13 signal. Another study was an extensive study on the tree swallow. These authors looked at more than 3,500 nests throughout its entire breeding range, in the northern U.S. and southern Canada. They found that this swallow is breeding about eight days earlier per decade or twenty days during the course of the twenty-four year study. Another fun study was one that was done by Rafe Sagarin. There was a scientist in the early 1930s that studied intertidal organisms along the California coast. He pounded nails into rocks to mark his study sites, and then he recorded what species were there and the dynamics. Rafe went out and found those nails so he could set up his study sites in exactly the same locations. He found that the species that were south of the study sites in 1930 now were in the study sites, and the species that used to be in the study sites have shifted north. ER: So these are limpets? TR: They are limpets, starfish, sea anemones, and other intertidal organisms. ER: You d have to be a pretty careful observer to see that. TR: Yes. In Camille and Gary s paper they quantified how far things are shifting north. We did not quantify how far they have shifted. ER: Just a yes or no? TR: Exactly. ER: Were there any things that countered the trend? TR: Yes, there were. We have not looked at the examples that were not shifting in the way expected. In our study we didn t look at how many species were changing compared to how many species there were because we ll never know how many species there are. We were looking at how many species were changing in the direction expected for global warming compared to the total number of species changing. That was about 80 percent, so 20 percent were changing in the direction we didn t expect. ER: Your species are moving to higher latitudes. Where are you talking about that in terms of the range shifts for the intertidal? Have we slipped into category number two already? TR: Yes, exactly. The intertidal In response to global warming species are moving north in the Northern Hemisphere and south in the Southern Hemisphere; and they are moving up in elevation. organisms were moving north. Camille did a nice study on butterflies along the Pacific coast, and she found that they were moving north. There is a subspecies of butterfly in Baja, California, that she found was moving north quite rapidly. This may be one of the first recorded extinctions due to global warming; the butterfly can t continue to move north because San Diego s in the way. ER: Why care about species moving around? They ve moved around for millions if not billions of years, so what s the difference? TR: Yes, species have moved around for all of the time they ve been around, but the thing is that they have not had to move this rapidly. The global average temperature has not shifted by this much this fast. ER: Since the last 18,000 years anyway. TR: Right. Also, when populations have shifted around before, they didn t have to try to cross factories, farms, freeways, and cities. They re getting a double whammy: they re going to have to move relatively rapidly, and they ll have to move along whatever remnants of habitat are left. Species such as birds, flying insects, and bats, which can move rapidly, may not be that badly affected. Those populations that can t move rapidly, amphibians and plants, for instance, may be in serious trouble. This is my concern for trees. Tree populations can and do move, but it takes time. The southern individuals in a population of trees are going to be stressed by warmer climate and they re going to become more susceptible to fire. Differential movement among species is also a concern. If the population of a warbler, which preys on the spruce budworm caterpillar, shifts north, then the caterpillars in the south are probably not going to have the predators around that specialize on eating it. The density of caterpillar population may not be held down by the predators so they could go much higher in abundance, which could stress the trees even more. The timber companies are not going to be very happy about that. Another example is in the timing of when the pied flycatcher in Europe lays its eggs. In the past it has timed its nesting to coincide with when the 13