Whether it’s a polar bear clinging to a melting iceberg in the Arctic or a tiny, rabbitlike pika panting atop a warming mountain in western North America, scientists say that these species and others could be historical footnotes unless people help them survive.

Pushing animals to the brink – and then trying to bring them back – is nothing new for humans. Remedies have long included setting aside land for a special habitat (spotted owls) or making it illegal to kill them (whooping cranes).

But sweeping changes that would accompany projected climate change mean that an animal’s traditional range may no longer be habitable to it in a few years – or that a key food source or resource it needs is disappearing. And that calls for different solutions from those in the past.

“The business-as-usual approach to managing wildlife populations and resources is no longer likely to work very well,” says John Wiens, chief conservation science officer for the Point Reyes Bird Observatory in Petaluma, Calif. “We can’t say anymore, ‘Hey, we’ll do some management to control this threat, and everything will be hunky-dory,’ or ‘Preserve some habitat and some organisms, and everything will be fine.’ ”

There are signs of positive action, however. After years of what many saw as foot-dragging, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is leading states and other organizations in taking the first steps toward what could become a radical departure from today’s species-recovery model.

The FWS’s plan is a comprehensive and predictive “adaptation management” plan to help troubled wildlife. Its centerpiece is the creation of eight new regional landscape conservation cooperatives (LCCs), the first of up to 20 nationwide that will enlist multiple partners to deal with global warming’s expected effects.

Along with the US Geological Survey (USGS), states, and others, the FWS is now holding regional conferences on how to shape the cooperatives.

“We’re just at the very beginning stages of LCC development,” says Dan Ashe, deputy director of the FWS, in a phone interview. “We have to be able to be more predictive, to be able to look into the future to how climate change is affecting species like the grizzly bear, polar bear, or coho salmon.”

Gazing into the future is the key. Last month, Congress provided $25 million in fresh funding for the cooperatives, each of which will have a core staff of scientists to create models of probable regional climate impacts and provide scientific analysis for future wildlife management plans.

“The LCCs are integral to climate adaptation efforts,” according to an internal agency draft “function and form” document. Even so, they will not be “climate-centric,” but will “provide scientific support for conservation actions addressing a variety of broad-scale challenges, including water scarcity, species invasion, wildlife disease, as well as changing climate.

Using advanced computer models, LCC scientists will report how global warming could change regional ecosystems decades from now, allowing researchers to calculate whether a recovery plan in a species’ home range makes sense.

That, in turn, might make it possible to determine if a wildlife corridor, a way for animals to migrate past highways and cities to cooler northern climes, is possible. Or whether more drastic measures – such as translocating a species (capturing and moving it) – are necessary.

Scott Loarie’s pioneering work points to a decline of up to 59 percent in pika populations across the western US if greenhouse-gas emissions reach the higher end of the scale predicted by the International Panel on Climate Change. Even under the most optimistic IPCC scenarios, 15 percent of pikas would disappear. Higher levels of decline could bring calls for more radical adaptive techniques.

Options for the pika, which requires temperatures below 80 degrees F., could include spending more time underground to avoid the heat. But that may mean pikas couldn’t graze sufficiently to get fat enough to survive the winter. says Dr. Loarie, a researcher with the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University in California.

However, “if policymakers create larger areas that lessen sheep grazing and logging at higher altitudes, that management might help their chances a lot,” Loarie says.

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