Environmentalists pick Snake Basin, Yellowstone among most threatened habitats by climate change | Voices.IdahoStatesman.com
A national environmental group has identified the Snake River Basin and the greater Yellowstone ecosystem as two of the top ten most important habitats to protect in a warming world.
The Endangered Species Coalition, made up of environmental groups from around the nation, picked the two areas that together make up most of Idaho along with the Everglades, the polar ice cap and the world’s coral reefs.
The list, tied to national environmental campaigns to protect endangered species shifts in many cases the focus from protecting single species to ecosystems. It comes as scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict 20 to 30 percent of the world's species will be lost if current warming trends continue.
"What has been lost in the news over climate change and what this report highlights is that, at this very moment, we have a crucial window of opportunity to save species and ecosystems,” said Jean Brennan, a Nobel Prize-winning researcher at Virginia Tech’s Conservation Management Institute. “There are conservation measures that if taken now can greatly increase a habitat's and species' ability to withstand climate change.”
The Snake River’s salmon and steelhead climb higher than any other salmon in the world – more than 7,000 feet – and its chinook and sockeye travel farther – almost 1,000 miles inland – to reach their natal streams said Don Chapman, a retired Idaho fisheries biologist respected by people on all sides of the debate. The salmon carry nutrients from the Pacific Ocean to more than 150 other species, including several other endangered species.
“This place is truly a ‘Noah’s Ark’ for salmon,” Chapman said. “But we need to remove the four dams on the lower Snake River in order to reconnect this special habitat to the salmon that call it home.”
The whitebark pine is the species environmental groups and scientists focus on when they worry about warming in greater Yellowstone, which includes the upper Snake River Valley in eastern Idaho. Warming temperatures at high elevations have allowed the mountain pine beetle to reach the pine that live higher.
Scientists predict the beetle infestations may destroy 80 percent of the alpine whitebark pine. Everything from wildlife, to the snowpack important for growing crops and drinking depends on the pines said Louisa Willcox, senior wildlife advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
While Chapman has a straightforward answer to protecting salmon’s habitat in the Snake Basin, the answer for saving whitebark pine is not so simple.
The NRDC and other groups are pushing the listing of the tree to increase its profile to ring more research and management attention. Critics say listing wll only mae implementing management fixes harder.
But both sides agree that more research is needed and pilot programs to move blister rust-resistant pines to higher elevations where beetles are not immediate threats should be tried.
The dam removal option is the last resort of the Obama administration’s current proposal for managing dams and salmon on the Columbia and Snake rivers. Supporters of the plan point to the amount of power the four dams generate about 1,000 megawatts of electricity a year - close to what Idahoans use - without spouting the nearly 4 million tons of greenhouse gases that coal plants would produce to make that power.”
But fisheries biologists like Chapman say the more than 22 million acres of wild and roadless high-elevation watersheds in central Idaho and eastern Oregon provide the best habitat left for salmon and steelhead to survive in the lower 48. And they say energy efficiency and alternative energy can replace the dams at little cost to consumers.
But the barge shipping that carries wheat and other goods from Idaho to the Pacific also would end. So would the route oil companies hope to ship large-sized loads of equipment to the oil sands region of northern Alberta from Korea.
The top ten list also includes the Sierra Mountain range in California and the San Francisco Bay and Delta, also last holdouts for salmon and other species. Other areas include the Hawaiian Islands, the Gulf Coast and the southwest deserts, all places with environmental campaigns.
But the focus on the larger ecosystems fits the approach that former Interior Secretary, Idaho governor and senator Dirk Kempthorne advocated over the past two decades. Even if the current warming trend is not caused by the high level of greenhouse gases that have been added to the atmosphere by people, as the IPCC and most scientists say, this conservation approach sets the kind of priorities the nation and the world will have to make in a warming world.
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