Study: Climate change will dry up prairie wetlands

A new study reveals the prairie wetlands in the Upper Midwest's "Pothole Prairie" region may be more sensitive to global warming that previously thought, and climate change there could affect millions of waterfowl that depend on the region for food, shelter and raising their young.

The study, published in the research journal BioScience, used a new wetland model that projected major reductions in water volume, shortening of the time water remains in wetlands and changes to wetland vegetation dynamics, Newswise reports. "The impact to the millions of wetlands that attract countless ducks to these breeding grounds in spring makes it difficult to imagine how to maintain today’s level of waterfowl populations in altered climate conditions," Dr. Glenn Guntenspergen, a U.S. Geological Survey researcher and one of the authors, said in a news release. "Parents may not have time to raise their young to where they can fly because of wetlands drying up too quickly in the warming climate of the future." Many wetland species require a minimum time in water to complete their life cycles.

"Unfortunately, the model simulations show that under forecasted climate-change scenarios for this region (an increase of 4 degrees Celsius), the western prairie potholes will be too dry and the eastern ones will have too few functional wetlands and nesting habitat to support historical levels of waterfowl and other wetland-dependent species," Dr. W. Carter Johnson, another study author and a researcher at South Dakota State University, said in the release. (Read more)