R reinde populations could fall up to 80% in 2100, researchers say.

Reindeer Populations throughout the Arctic will probably decrease substantially due to Climate change In the coming decades with the population of North America that faces the greatest risk, researchers predict.

Although the species has survived multiple periods of Arctic heating, climate change has already contributed to the loss of almost two thirds of world reindeer populations in the last three decades, according to the research team, led by the University of Adelaida in Australia and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

There are about 9 million reindeer worldwide, including domesticated, according to World Polumny Review.

The wild reindeers of North America, also called Caribou and estimated at around 3.5 million for the world population review, are at a higher risk of a heating climate, the researchers said. The Caribu are in Alaska and Canada.

Caribou populations could decrease up to 80% for 2100, “unless there are important cuts for greenhouse gas emissions and a greater investment in wildlife management and conservation,” said Damien Fordham, associate professor and deputy director of the Environment Institute of the University of Adelaide, in a statement.

The researchers came to their conclusion by examining how reindeer have responded to past climatic events.

“Using fossils, ancient DNA and computer models, we rebuild changes in the abundance and distribution of reindeer in the last 21,000 years in resolutions never before made, and we compare them directly with future predictions,” said principal investigator Elisabetta Canteri in a statement.

They discovered that reindeer populations have decreased during the past periods of “rapid climate warming.”

“But the expected losses in the coming decades due to future climate change are probably even more serious than those of the past,” Canteri said.

A decrease in reindeer populations could also have broader ecological implications because animals help maintain the diversity of plants in the tundra.

“A reduction in the diversity of tundra plants resulting from the loss of reindeer and caribús will have many cascade effects, including the reduction of carbon storage in Arctic soils,” said Eric Post, a professor at the University of California Davis that contributed to research. “Continuous losses will probably exacerbate climate warming even more through the liberation of carbon from the soil to the atmosphere, which, of course, would further threaten reindeer and caribu, as well as ourselves.”

• Climate change
• Arctic