A recent study done by North Carolina State University revealed that the mammals choosing their habitat are hugely influenced by the climate change that is caused by human activity.
The study is published in the Diversity and Distributions with the title of “Climate, food and humans predict communities of mammals in the United States.”
This study has revealed how climate change impacts the wildlife population, according to the lead author of the study, a research professor at NC State and a scientist at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, Roland Kays, the study is done to understand the climate and human relation, and how human factors impact mammals choosing a home to live.
During their research, they collected data on 25 different species from 6,645 locations across the United States. The data was captured by the largest camera that trapped the data from Snapshot USA, this was a national mammal camera trap survey.
Kays said “One of our ideas was that humans may have changed our landscape so much that we have become the primary determinants of which animals live where,” he further added, “What we found was that in fact humans were not the most important. Climate, including temperature and the amount of rainfall, was the most important factor across most of the species we observed.”
According to Kay, human involvement in agricultural activities and the population will impact the species on choosing there home as near the human urbanized area it's getting harder for them to survive.
He explained that a lot of species can adapt to living in human-populated areas like the Eastern grey squirrel which is great at living with humans along with this there is another species that is Eastern fox squirrel which it well in agriculture but not in survival among humans.
He said. “We can see those differences in many other species. The snowshoe hare does poorly around both people and around agriculture. This study allows us to see the species that are sensitive to our impacts, and which ones benefit.”
This whole data contributed to the mapping of the mammals across the contiguous U.S. and then to the segregation of the mammals according to the regions of the country. This study led to the creation of mammal-based ecoregions.
This study is particularly important as it sheds light on how climate change could affect wildlife populations, emphasizing the need for conservation efforts that take into account the climatic preferences of different species.
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