New Pub Examines Climate Change Impacts on Alligators

Drs. Wade Ryberg and Michelle Lawing have recently published their work examining how predicted climate changes are likely to impact a species that has endured unchanged for tens of millions of years: the American alligator, Alligator mississippiensis. Data suggest that alligators responded to past changes in climate by adjusting their distribution to areas that were most habitable to them, and they are likely to attempt to do so again in response to future changes that promise to move their range northward. With their movements being restricted by natural and human barriers and the rate of change now being far more rapid than it was in the past, populations of this resilient and widespread species may require human interventions in the future to persist.

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