The cool of the forest is a welcome escape on a hot day. This is especially true for mammals in North America’s hottest regions, according to a study from the University of California, Davis. The study indicates that, as the climate warms, preserving forest cover will be increasingly important for wildlife conservation.

From jaguars and ocelots to anteaters and capybara, most land-based mammals living in the Brazilian Amazon are threatened by climate change and the projected savannization of the region. That’s according to a study published in the journal Animal Conservation by the University of California, Davis.

[Leia esse artigo em português.]

The idea of food chains and food webs in the animal kingdom is simple: Remove a link or thread, and the system is broken. But nature is complex, and it’s not always clear how the absence of one species may impact others. 

Other times, the connection is devastatingly clear. 

[Lea este comunicado de prensa en Español.]

About the size of a small school bus, the basking shark is the second largest fish in the ocean and is found in temperate and tropical waters across the globe. In the mid-1900s, basking sharks were observed by the thousands each year off California’s coast. Now they are rarely seen at all in this region, called the California Current Ecosystem, or CCE.

California drivers lost about $232 million to costs associated with wildlife-vehicle conflicts in 2018 and over $1 billion since 2015, according to the sixth annual Wildlife Vehicle Conflict report from the Road Ecology Center at the University of California, Davis.

Wildlife-vehicle conflict hot spots mapped according to density and statistical significance in California. Red are areas of high density or statistically significant clustering of WVC incidents. (UC Davis Road Ecology Center)