Climate Change May Drive Iberian Lynx to Extinction Within 50 Years

Global warming has led to the extinction of many species. Scientists say that some animals will have to accelerate their evolution 10,000 times to acclimatize themselves to the changing climate. One such species falling into the clutches of climate change is the lynx found in Southern Europe.

A latest study from Spain reveals that climate change could drive the Iberian lynx to extinction within 50 years despite the substantial ongoing efforts to conserve their population.

"We show that climate change could lead to a rapid and severe decrease in lynx abundance in coming decades, and probably lead to its extinction in the wild within 50 years," lead author Dr Damien Fordham from the University of Adelaide's Environment Institute, said in a press statement. "Current management efforts could be futile if they don't take into account the combined effects of climate change, land use and prey abundance on population dynamics of the Iberian lynx."

The Iberian lynx is considered the world's most endangered cat species and is native to the Iberian Peninsula in Southern Europe. The lynx find it difficult to alter their diet, as a result there was a severe decline in their population in the 20^th century as their main prey, 'the European rabbit', also disappeared. Their decline was further pushed by habitat destruction. But recently there has been a significant improvement in their numbers due to various captive breeding and reintroduction programs. Currently, there are 309 Iberian lynx living in the wild in Andalusia. (source Wikipedia.)

The latest study notes that in order to reintroduce the Iberian Lynx to new habitats if at all they survive, the impact of climate change should be incorporated into their rehabilitation strategies.

Due to the concerted efforts of the conservationists the population of lynx has shown a slight improvement. But researchers caution that the ongoing conservation programs can successfully retain the species numbers just for a few decades as climate change will soon drive them to extinction.

"Models used to investigate how climate change will affect biodiversity have so far been unable to capture the dynamic and complex feedbacks of species interactions," says Dr Miguel Araujo, Spanish Research Council (CSIC) Senior Researcher at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid. "By developing new forecasting methods, we have managed, for the first time, to simulate demographic responses of lynx to spatial patterns of rabbit abundance conditioned by disease, climate change, and land use modification."

The south-west of the Iberian Peninsula, where the two existing populations of lynx persist, will most likely become inhospitable to the lynx by the middle of the century.  And the reintroduction plans are currently aimed at southern Spain and Portugal. But this species requires higher altitudes and latitude regions of the Iberian Peninsula, says CSIC researcher Dr. Alejandro Rodra­guez.

The study was published in Nature Climate Change.