Studying a lizard species in Arizona mountains, researchers found 70 years' worth of climate-related extinction occurred in only seven years.
Climate change is causing extinctions at an increasing rate, a new study by the University of Arizona researchers shows. They surveyed populations of the Yarrow's spiny lizard in 18 mountain ranges in southeastern Arizona and analyzed the rate of climate-related extinction over time.
The Yarrow's spiny lizard native to the southwestern U.S. and western Mexico can be spotted in oak and pine forests in 18 of Arizona's Sky Islands mountain ranges. Wiens and his group did initial surveys of the Yarrow's spiny lizard in these mountain ranges in 2014 and 2015.
Although previous studies have predicted that climate-related extinctions will increase with the rising pace of global warming, Wiens said he hasn't seen any showing that this acceleration of extinction has already happened.Also, a distinct 3-million-year-old lineage of the Yarrow's spiny lizard from the Mule Mountains, near Bisbee, may be completely extinct by 2025, according to Wiens.
However, not all low-elevation populations went extinct between the surveys, Wiens said. For example, two populations that occurred at very low elevations survived. Before they disappeared, the research group had collected genomic data from most of those populations in 2014 and 2015. They found that those populations that were less genetically variable and were exposed to greater climate change effects were the ones that tended to go extinct.
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