Climatic calamities and endangered species

Written by Syed Mujahid Ali Shah, by email

15 August 2010 The recent heavy rains in northern mountainous belts of Pakistan are hardly going to spare wild fauna from devastating their habitats as that of human population.

Among all such animals, the most concerned specie is snow leopard. They are already threatened being left only a few hundreds in these mountain ranges due to ongoing prey depletion of theirs following dry conditions caused by ever increasing temperature trends. But a wet calamity of heavy rains during recent weeks anticipates a new threat.

The unusual heavy summer rainfall situations are opposite to that of normal weather conditions of snow leopard habitats in the Himalaya and Karakoram ranges of Gilgit Baltistan and Chitral. This drastic change in climate can create vegetation rich landscape situation where snow leopards and its prey species cannot live.

As the ideal habitat of these animals is open semi desert rocky mountains—out of dense vegetations like those of Chilghoza pine near nival zones of Himalayas and Karakoram. On the other hand huge rainfall situations, as some recently recorded 100 mm/h in Baltistan and Ladakh regions, being semi desert rocky hills, they are easily eroded and lose most of the soil. What leaves behind may be just rock, unable to produce enough fodder for the species of Markhor, ibex, Marcopolo sheep and the musk deer on which snow leopards thrive. Isn’t the world becoming so unsafe for both human and animals from carbon emissions in bulk? If timely steps were not taken to cut the greenhouse gases by the industrialised nations, such species would just wither away.

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?section=openspace&xfile=data/openspace/2010/august/openspace_august16.xml

One thought on “Climatic calamities and endangered species”

  1. The article highlights one of the serious problem that Snow leopard and its prey species may face in the future.This is high time for the researchers to pick a few points in the most popular habitats of SL such as Khunjerab and Chitral Gol National Parks, conducting analysis of how do the habitats look like in the post-rains/floods scenario. This will be further useful if the researchers could also indicate on the resilience of such habitats to recover back from the current shocks in such areas.Although the university students such as those of Karakorum International University in Gilgit may assign this as M Phil or PhD theses, opportunities of funding exists for others with WWF-Pakistan through their “small” grants program which is quite generous towards good proposals.

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