Climate change could lead to extinction

SANTA CRUZ, Calif., April 17 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers have determined climate change can cause "boom and bust" population cycles that make animal species more vulnerable to extinction.

University of California-Santa Cruz Assistant Professor Christopher Wilmers and colleagues found favorable environmental conditions that produce abundant supplies of food and stimulate population booms appear to set the stage for population crashes that occur when several consecutive "good years" are followed by a bad year.

"It's almost paradoxical, because you'd think a large population would be better off, but it turns out they're more vulnerable to a drop in resources," said Wilmers, noting understanding how environmental changes influence fluctuations in animal populations is crucial to predicting and mitigating the influence of global climate change.

Wilmers and colleagues Eric Post and Alan Hastings describe their new mathematical model that evaluates how climate and resources interact with populations in a paper that appears in the May issue of The American Naturalist.