Out of the Frying Pan?

摘要

Despite the continuing rise in dam removals, not all long-term trends are good news for salmon. Climate change and ocean acidification, according to recent studies, threaten to wipe out possible gains and could push many salmon runs to extinction by the end of this century. A new climate-modeling effort called the Riverscape Analysis Project finds that climate change will affect rivers throughout the Pacific Rim. The effort, led by ]ack Stanford and John Kimball at the University of Montana's Flathead Lake Biological Station in Poison, starts with a standard hydrologic model for how temperature and precipitation changes affect river temperatures and stream flows. The researchers incorporated information from satellite and space shuttle images on the physical characteristics of 1500 rivers, as well as the extent of existing salmon runs, and examined how expected air temperature changes given by scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would likely affect river temperatures, flows, and fish populations.