title: Contemporary Drought and Future Effects of Climate Change on the Endangered Blunt-Nosed Leopard Lizard, Gambelia sila.
abstract: Extreme weather events can provide unique opportunities for testing models that predict the effect of climate change. Droughts of increasing severity have been predicted under numerous models, thus contemporary droughts may allow us to test these models prior to the onset of the more extreme effects predicted with a changing climate. In the third year of an ongoing severe drought, surveys failed to detect neonate endangered blunt-nosed leopard lizards in a subset of previously surveyed populations where we expected to see them. By conducting surveys at a large number of sites across the range of the species over a short time span, we were able to establish a strong positive correlation between winter precipitation and the presence of neonate leopard lizards over geographic space. Our results are consistent with those of numerous longitudinal studies and are in accordance with predictive climate change models. We suggest that scientists can take immediate advantage of droughts while they are still in progress to test patterns of occurrence in other drought-sensitive species and thus provide for more robust models of climate change effects on biodiversity.
authors.affiliation: Hollister Field Office, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, Hollister, California, United States of America.
authors.forename: Michael F
authors.initials: MF
authors.lastname: Westphal
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California, United States of America.
authors.forename: Joseph A E
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Stewart
authors.affiliation: Lands Unit, Central Region, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Fresno, California, United States of America.
authors.forename: Erin N
authors.initials: EN
authors.lastname: Tennant
authors.affiliation: The Nature Conservancy, San Francisco, California, United States of America.
authors.forename: H Scott
authors.initials: HS
authors.lastname: Butterfield
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California, United States of America.
authors.forename: Barry
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Sinervo
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D057231:Climate Change; D055864:Droughts; D056727:Endangered Species; D008116:Lizards; D011157:Population Dynamics; D014887:Weather