Animals Are Mass Migrating to the Northern Hemisphere Due to Climate Change. Here’s What It Means for Our Planet

While humans whine over facing the impacts of global warming, poor voiceless beings often go unnoticed. As extreme quantities of greenhouse gases pilfer Earth’s ecosystem, half of the world’s 4,000 animal species are migrating toward more habitable regions. From polar bears to purple emperor butterflies, from green sea turtles to mountain gorillas and African elephants, animals everywhere are on tenterhooks, often sickened by the melting icebergs and rising sea levels. To demonstrate a clear picture of this migrating scenario, data whiz, Dan Majka, from The Nature Conservancy’s science team, created a mesmerizing animated map titled “Migrations in Motion.”

In 2013, a team of researchers from the University of Washington and The Nature Conservancy designed this migration map, showing the animals’ movements and patterns. But then they realized that the map needed to be animated to visualize the complete effect of the results. That’s when they approached Majka. Using data from a 2013 study published in Ecology Letters, Majka created this map, projecting the migratory pathways of 2954 species including mammals, birds, and amphibians. “This is the best visualization of any of these studies we’ve done. It’s much more compelling than our static maps,” Joshua Lawler, the professor in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences and lead author of the 2013 study said in a university press release. 

Majka used the “flow model” from electronic circuit theory to produce the future migration visualization. The brilliant color-coded map uses dots to illustrate cities and multicolored neon streaks to depict the animals’ movement patterns. The streaks are constantly changing and pulsating, showing how animals are rapidly moving away from their homes to track better habitats for their survival. After observing the map for the first time, the team noticed that the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains were two of the most important areas of migration, explained Lawler.

“These routes popped out like well-trodden paths. It was shocking to see these features emerge so clearly. You can really see them when the data are visualized like this,” he said. In South America, the most important projected area of movement turned out to be Amazon. “Our results reveal areas with projected high densities of climate-driven movements – including, the Amazon Basin, the southeastern United States, and southeastern Brazil," the researchers noted in the paper, adding that, some of these regions, such as southern Bolivia and northern Paraguay, contain relatively intact landscapes, whereas human activities heavily impact others such as the southeastern United States and Brazil.

However, as Majka told Wired, it is difficult to decide whether humans will be able to see extreme and obvious migrations. But one thing is for sure. If global warming continues to melt ice sheets and lift the swell of the oceans, then animals will have no choice but to move to someplace where they can at least survive, if not thrive. “Climate change is going to mean that a lot of species will have to move,” Brad McRae, a senior landscape ecologist at the Nature Conservancy, told Fast Company. “We just need conservation efforts to help species go where they need to go.”