A mule deer grazes in Utah.
Photo Credit: Jonathan D. Mallory/BLM Utah
(Public domain)
Scientific Frontline: Extended "At a Glance" Summary: Climate-Induced Habitat Shrinkage in the American West
The Core Concept: Extreme and worsening droughts in the American Southwest are drastically reducing the extent of highly suitable habitats and severely lowering reproductive fitness for large mammalian species. This environmental stress impacts wildlife across all trophic levels, from herbivores to apex predators.
Key Distinction/Mechanism: Contrary to the assumption that primary consumers (herbivores) suffer most directly from dying vegetation, drought impacts actually amplify as they move up the food web. Predators like cougars experience a significantly greater proportional reduction in highly selected habitat (18%) compared to their prey (10% for mule deer), due to the increased energetic cost and limitations of sourcing food.
Origin/History: A 2026 study led by the University of Michigan, published in Communications Earth and Environment, analyzed 12 years of GPS collar data (2010–2022). The research tracked more than 3,000 large mammals—mule deer, black bears, and cougars—across a nearly 200,000-square-mile range in Nevada and Utah.
Major Frameworks/Components:
- Trophic Amplification: The ecological phenomenon demonstrating that climate-induced resource scarcity magnifies in severity for species occupying higher trophic levels.
- Habitat Suitability Modeling: The application of extensive longitudinal GPS tracking data to map and quantify spatial reductions in environments capable of supporting specific wildlife populations.
- Fitness Decline Metrics: The empirical tracking of survival and reproductive rates, revealing that extreme drought decreases mule deer fawn-per-doe ratios by more than 30%.
Branch of Science: Ecology, Conservation Biology, Wildlife Management, Climatology.
Future Application: The development of integrated landscape and natural resource management protocols that treat climate variables (drought, wildfire) and multi-species wildlife conservation as a unified system, moving away from isolated single-species management strategies.
Why It Matters: As anthropogenic global warming accelerates the frequency and intensity of extreme droughts, understanding cross-species habitat constraints is critical for forecasting biodiversity loss and establishing robust climate mitigation strategies for vulnerable wildlife populations.
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| As drought intensified in Utah and Nevada, the area of suitable habitat decreased for cougar, black bear and mule deer. Image Credit: M. Leclerc et al. Comm. Earth and Environ. 2026 (DOI: 10.1038/s43247-026-03530-y) |
As people in the United States cope with historic drought conditions, the country’s wildlife also faces significant challenges due to the extreme aridity.
Herbivores, omnivores, and carnivores in the Southwestern US have all experienced a reduction in the extent of their suitable habitat because of drought, according to a new study led by the University of Michigan.
“The take-home message is that the effects of drought are huge and widespread. These results aren’t just from one small study system,” said Kirby Mills, a lead author of the new study published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.
Mills, now with the Institute for Wildlife Studies in California, helped lead the work as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan Institute for Global Change Biology.
The study analyzed 12 years’ worth of data collected by GPS collars worn by mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), black bears (Ursus americanus), and cougars (Puma concolor)—herbivores, omnivores, and carnivores, respectively—in Nevada and Utah. Currently, Utah is one of nine states completely covered by some level of drought. During severe drought conditions, each species saw at least a 10% reduction in the area of highly selected, or highly suitable, habitat.
“We found that drought was negatively impacting life across Utah and Nevada statewide for species that have very different ecologies,” Mills said. “We just looked at these three large mammals, but drought is probably affecting all the wildlife living in this region and could threaten their persistence into the future if droughts get worse.”
The study, supported by federal funding from NASA, also demonstrated that under extreme drought, the number of new fawn mule deer per doe can decline by more than 30%.
“What we’re seeing is that drought is having a major impact not just on habitat suitability, but also on fitness, on the survival of wildlife,” said Martin Leclerc, who co-led the study as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS). Leclerc is now an assistant professor at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi.
In quantifying the impact of drought conditions in the Southwest, which are becoming more intense and frequent on a warming planet, the study underscores how entwined climate and conservation are, the authors stated.
“The study highlights the growing intersection of climate patterns, including drought and wildfire, with landscape planning and management, natural resource management, vegetation dynamics, wildlife behavior, and management—all of these things that are often looked at separately,” said Neil Carter, associate professor at SEAS and a senior author of the study. “Now we’re finding that they’re enmeshed so tightly, and that demands different management strategies moving forward.”
Connections and Opportunities
The team’s analysis included information from more than 3,000 animals across a nearly 200,000-square-mile range between 2010 and 2022, resulting in what Leclerc described as a “painfully massive” amount of data.
The team credited David Stoner, another senior author and associate professor at Utah State University, for knowing where to look and who to contact to collect the data from many separate sources. In bringing all that information together, the researchers could investigate how much area each species inhabited as drought conditions changed over time and space.
“The study really shows the value and importance of long-term datasets, especially for big questions related to climate change,” Leclerc said.
The team’s analysis revealed that when it came to habitat reduction, the impact of drought amplified from prey to predators. In severe drought, mule deer saw reductions of 10% in their highly selected habitat, compared with 14% for black bears, and 18% for cougars.
Initially, the numbers were surprising. As drought conditions kill vegetation, the researchers anticipated this would have the greatest impact on the herbivorous deer. However, the team provided an explanation for why the opposite is true.
“Cougars can’t just go and chomp on whatever they find that’s green like deer can,” Mills said. “That means cougars have to work harder for their food, and they’re more limited in their opportunities to find food, so their populations can be more sensitive to perturbations.”
Furthermore, population densities tend to decrease as one moves up the food web; for example, the study included more than 2,800 mule deer and 105 cougars. Consequently, cougars may not only be more sensitive to the impacts of drought, but impacts on individual cougars will also be felt more acutely at a community level. While this amplification makes cougars and other predators more vulnerable than one might expect, it could also create new opportunities in conservation.
“People are typically managing deer populations, not deer and cougar simultaneously, so I think there will start to be more conversation and communication around that,” Carter said.
These broader conversations could benefit wildlife writ large.
“There’s pretty robust planning going on for mitigating human vulnerability to climate change, but we don’t have the same level of planning for mitigating wildlife vulnerability,” Carter said. “I certainly think there are opportunities to bring those together.”
Published in journal: Communications Earth and Environment
Title: Extreme droughts shrink suitable habitats and reduce fitness for large mammals in the American West
Authors: Martin Leclerc, Kirby L. Mills, Mark A. Ditmer, David C. Stoner, Joseph O. Sexton, Panshi Wang, Kent R. Hersey, Cody A. Schroeder, Alyson M. Andreasen, David Choate, Derek B. Hall, Kathleen M. Longshore, Darren DeBloois, Kristin Engebretsen, Julie K. Young, Patrick J. Jackson, Kathryn A. Schoenecker, and Neil H. Carter
Source/Credit: University of Michigan
Edited by: Scientific Frontline
Reference Number: eco052626_01
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