Climate change

The intent of this project is to measure possible effects of global climatic change on certain endemic terrestrial vertebrates. This is being accomplished by revisiting three different mountains on the island intensively studied along an elevational gradient over 15 years ago and repeating the inventory methods down to very fine details, such as the same dates and placements of different types of traps. While data on the presence and absence of a given taxonomic group will be used in comparing the previous and recent inventories, the unique aspect we have added to the project is employing molecular genetic data. We will becomparing shifts in haplotypic frequencies through time and this measure may be directly correlated with global warming, pushing animals to higher altitudes to find preferable biotypes.