Biologists believe some flora and fauna can act as highly sensitive indicators of climate change, responding to small but sustained alterations in temperature.The findings from the conference are being released in Kyoto today by the international conservation groups World Wide Fund for Nature and Birdlife International, whose UK member is the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.The UN climate treaty negotiations in Kyoto are centred around what cuts developed countries should make in their emissions of climate changing greenhouse gases, principally carbon dioxide which comes from burning coal, oil and gas.They end in the middle of next week, and have made little progress so far. If it lives on cooler high ground, such as mountainsides, it can tolerate living in lower latitudes. The scientists found these upland butterflies had, on average, shifted nearly 400ft higher.Another study of 14 European butterfly species found nine had moved their range northwards by an average of 125 miles this century, three had stayed roughly put, one was expanding in all directions and only one appeared to be moving southwards. Research on alpine plants has shown that they are moving up mountains as higher temperatures climb up from below.These are a few of the examples discussed at a scientific conference on wildlife and climate change in Coloradoearlier this year. This time it is will be far more difficult because vast areas of potential habitat have been taken over by man for cities and intensively exploited farmland.Migrating water birds may find the mudflats and salt marshes they rely on as feeding grounds disappearing beneath small rises in sea level.Researchers have found that of 65 British bird species, most are nesting earlier than they were a quarter century ago – nine days earlier, on average.

Also in the UK, frogs, toads and newts seem to be arriving at ponds to spawn a few days earlier than they did 17 years ago.In the United States, a study of a butterfly species called Edith’s checkerspot indicates that the southern edge of its range has been shifted 60 miles north as a result of an average 0.7C warming.Any further south and conditions are too hot for the butterfly to maintain a population, but it has an alternative – moving upwards. Birds, frogs, butterflies and alpine plants are all telling humans about our species’ potentially disastrous intervention in the workings of the earth’s climate, say the World Wide Fund for Nature and Birdlife International.
They are convinced that in the coming century, the accelerating pace of change will become a real threat to flora and fauna, threatening thousands of species with extinction.Many animals and plants have been able to cope with large, natural swings in temperature and rainfall in the past; they shifted their distribution. Both environmentalists and English Nature can agree that is necessary.. Wildlife as well as people will be endangered by man-made changes in climate, two leading conservation groups will tell the Kyoto climate treaty meeting today.

Nicholas Schoon, Environment Correspondent, looks at their claim that plants and animals are already giving early warning of a warming world. Alternatively, the Government would have to change the law concerning planning and wildlife sites. It was decried by environmentalists, who said it was wrong in principle and that further extraction would keep on lowering the water table – threatening the rest of the moors.This year, English Nature’s top officers had proposed removing the SSSI status from those parts of the moors being worked by Leavington. But yesterday, English Nature’s council rejected the proposal, because it could not be certain that continuing extraction would not damage the rest of the moors.Conservation groups were delighted but, as English Nature pointed out, the decision does nothing to get Leavington off the moor.To do that, the local council would have to revoke the company’s planning permission for peat extraction – in return for which it would have to pay large sums in compensation. Then it would have to stop, so the thin layer of remaining peat could hopefully be restored as bog.In effect, the deal gave the company about 30 years more exploitation of the moors.

The relatively undamaged majority of the moors, covered in vegetation, were given over to the conservation arm in order to protect them as nature reserves.Leavington was given carte blanche to keep mining peat from the remainder, until it got within half a metre of the underlying rock. It consists of a huge, low mound of peat which has accumulated over thousands of years, with its own collection of plant and animal species living on top.Despite their SSSI designation, for many years they have been damaged by peat extraction – which lowers the water table and dries them out, killing the special bog vegetation. In the past few decades this has escalated, thanks to massive, mechanised extraction to provide peat for horticulture.Five years ago English Nature did a deal with Leavington, the company which has long-established planning permissions to extract the peat. But, says Nicholas Schoon, that will not save them from peat extraction.