Climate change threatens one of North America's most endangered species

In the middle of the Mojave Desert, springs flow into marshes teeming with birds, bees and dragonflies. These marshes are home to one of North America’s most endangered mammals: the Amargosa vole.

A mouse-like rodent with cinnamon brown fur and a short tail, the Amargosa vole exists nowhere else on Earth — only in patches of wetlands scattered like islands across the desert east of Death Valley National Park. The wetlands depend on water from the springs, and years of drought have shrunk some of the marshes.

Climate change is projected to bring longer and more severe droughts in the future, threatening the springs and increasing the chances that more of the surviving voles could disappear.

The Amargosa vole - it's one of the species
threatened by global warming.

“As climate continues to change, those isolated habitats become more and more precious,” said Patrick Donnelly, executive director of the Amargosa Conservancy, a local environmental group. “And should something happen to even one of those isolated habitats, you may lose an important component of that population.”

The world is losing creatures at an accelerating rate: Species of frogs, lizards, fish and birds have all gone extinct as their habitats have been fragmented, degraded and destroyed by humans. Now, as the Earth grows warmer due to the burning of fossil fuels, the rapid disruption of the climate is placing even bigger stresses on species that are already struggling to survive.

Read The Desert Sun story - “The extinction crisis in a warming world.”