Climate change has shifted the boundaries of plant and animal

Climate change has shifted the boundaries of plant and animalhabitats, with some birds in the United States extending theirboundaries northward and trees moving farther up mountains, newstudies show.Between 2000 and 2005, New York state's Department of EnvironmentalConservation had thousands of volunteers all over the state observeand report the birds they could identify, creating a Breeding BirdAtlas of the various species' breeding ranges.Researchers at the State University of New York (SUNY) compared thisatlas to another one conducted between 1980 and 1985 for 83 speciesof birds that traditionally have bred in New York and found that manyhad extended their range boundaries northward, some by as many as 40miles (64 kilometers)."But the real signal came out with some of the northerly species thatare more common in Canada and the northern part of the U.S.," saidBenjamin Zuckerberg, a Ph.D. student at SUNY. "Their southern rangeboundaries are actually moving northward as well, at a much fasterclip."Some of the species making this southern boundary shift are theNashville warbler, a little bird with a yellow belly; the pinesiskin, a common finch that resembles a sparrow; and the red-belliedwoodpecker, considered the most common woodpecker in the Southeast.The shifts, announced today, are occurring in a relatively shortamount of time, the researchers also pointed out, happening in amatter of decades. These changes are also consistent with thepredictions of regional warming, they added.Warming is also forcing some mountain plant species to adapt bymoving to higher altitudes as it kills them in their traditionalranges. In Southern California, for example, warming temperatures andlonger dry spells have killed thousands of tree and plants, whilepushing their habitats an average of 213 feet up the Santa RosaMountains over the past 30 years, according to a new study detailedin the Aug. 11 issue of the journal Proceedings of the NationalAcademy of Sciences.Previous studies have also catalogued the ways that climate change isknocking the nature out of whack: birds are migrating earlier in theseason; reptiles and amphibians are also heading for the hills toreach cooler climes; and the timing of plant blooms is shifting asthe Earth heats up.