UC Berkeley museum biologists to repeat 85-year-old Yosemite National Park wildl...( obvious large or pervasive animals - be...)

obvious large or pervasive animals - bears, deer, owls and others - that have been the subject of previous targeted studies. Instead, the list includes a pocket mouse, two species of grasshopper mouse, six species of shrews, six species of chipmunks, and reptiles like the Western fence lizard, Western skink, sagebrush lizard, night snake and sharptailed snake.

"We're learning there have been ecological changes within the park that until now we haven't been able to document adequately," said Leslie Chow, a UC Berkeley graduate now serving in Yosemite as a research wildlife biologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. "We view the park as relatively pristine because we don't allow logging, but other actions - things like suppressing fires for a hundred years - have had an impact."

Moritz expects that other transects they survey will exhibit much greater change. "It's our best protected landscape in California, so we are expecting Yosemite to be the benchmark against which we can compare other transects," he said.

If Thompson and Chow have their way, museum scientists will regularly visit the park to document the changes occurring in species distribution and population.

"Grinnell established a baseline in the teens, and hopefully we can convince the park that this sort of monitoring needs to be done on a more regular basis," Chow said. "We'd like to get the museum involved so it will come back every 20 years and do something like this." "I hope this cooperation is just a springboard for further work we can do with the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology," Thompson said. "We do need the data."

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Contact: Robert Sanders
rls@pa.urel.berkeley.edu
510-643-6998
University of California - Berkeley
5-Aug-2003

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