Global warming stalks Yosemite

Good article about changing habitats etc.

http://tinyurl.com/ahzae

grasp.


Global warming stalks Yosemite

Retracing the steps of a meticulous early 20th century biologist, researchers find that some of the park’s tiniest residents have moved a startling distance uphill

Michelle Nijhuis

Sunday, November 27, 2005

The Merced River and Yosemite Falls look much the same as... Joseph Grinnell, who worked between 1904 and the late 193... Wldlife biologist Les Chow checks on mammal traps in Yose... This skull of a pika, a small relative of a rabbit, is pa...

Biologist Joseph Grinnell was a world-class researcher, but he wasn't always the most pleasant of traveling companions. "We'd be sitting in camp, and we'd both be skinning," recalled naturalist Ward Russell, who spent years helping Grinnell trap, skin and otherwise document the wildlife of California. "Pretty soon, he'd throw a rat over to me, and he'd say, 'Here, Russell, finish this one up,' and he'd just ... pick up his notebook, and start writing."

Despite his dubious camp etiquette, Grinnell's devoted record-keeping led to one of the most famous datasets in modern biology. During their travels throughout California between 1904 and the late 1930s, Grinnell and his colleagues snared or shot more than 20,000 mammal, bird, reptile and amphibian specimens, took about 2,000 photographs, and filled 13,000 journal pages with erratic penmanship and beautifully detailed observations. Their portrait of the natural diversity of California remains unmatched in its scope and depth.

Grinnell, the founding director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley, was by all accounts a dedicated, methodical researcher. His field journal, which he kept until just five days before his death in 1939, numbered more than 3,000 pages. He helped build the museum's store of animal skins and skeletons, an international collection now ranging from a hippo skull the size of an easy chair to shrew skeletons no larger than a thumb. His theories about species and their habitats are still taught in college biology courses.......



That future is now. Though several researchers have mined the Grinnell data during the past nine decades, no one has ever attempted a broad resurvey of the sites. Now, researchers at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, inspired by Grinnell's writings, hope to revisit about a third of the California sites by the museum's centennial in 2008. With funding from the U.S. Geological Survey and the Yosemite Fund, a nonprofit organization that supports research in the park, biologists began in 2003 to study 40 sites along Grinnell's "Yosemite Transect.".....