Climate change can have significant impacts on high-elevation lakes and imperiled Sierra Nevada Yellow-legged frogs that depend upon them, according to U.S. Forest Service and University of California, Berkeley, scientists.
Their findings show how a combination of the shallow lakes drying up in summer and predation by introduced trout in larger lakes severely limits the amphibian's breeding habitat, and can cause its extinction.
"Environmental factors that increase summer drying of small lakes are likely to bring further population decline because the larger lakes are off limits to breeding," said Kathleen Matthews a Forest Service scientist at the Pacific Southwest Research Station and one of the studies authors.
Matthews co-authored the 10-year study with Igor Lacan, of the U.C. Berkeley Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, and Krishna Feldman, another Pacific Southwest Research Station scientist. The Forest Service funded ...