Changing Science & decisions about endangered species:

Changing Science & decisions about endangered species:  Decisions about endangered species are supposed to be made based on the “best available evidence.” But science is an ongoing process and new findings often revise estimates of threats based on models built with old assumptions. An illustration of changing science concerns threats to species dependent on cold weather and snow such as wolverines and pikas.  Warming climate led USFWS to call the U.S. wolverines endangered but subsequent studies questioned the basis of this determination—I discuss this in detail in my book, Wildlife Politics.  More recently still, two articles discuss how wolverines, pikas, and other cold-weather dependent species may be able to find “refugia”  that are cooler than most of their habitat and thus preserve them despite increasing temperatures.  See the discussions in High Country News article by Julia Rosen at http://www.hcn.org/articles/can-microclimates-offer-safe-havens-for-threatened-species?utm_source=wcn1&utm_medium=email
And an article published in Plos One by Jennifer Curtis at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0106984
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