The Joshua Tree may be most famous for being the title, and featured on the cover of, the classic U2 album, but the tree is also vital to the ecosystem in which it resides, the Southern California desert. And now, the Riverside Press-Enterprise reports, the Joshua Trees are dying out, in part thanks to global warming and increased pollution levels.

Joshua trees are a foundation species, providing habitat for other animals that otherwise would disappear, said [California desert program manager Mike] Cipra… Besides the foraging hawk and a scrub jay calling nearby, there are Scott’s orioles that build hanging nests in the trees, rodents that pry food from its seed pods and the Yucca night lizard, the smallest lizard in North America, which nests under its fallen branches, he said.

Scientists have made numerous predictive models of the desert ecosystem over the next century, and the outlook is being described as a “worst-case scenario” – no new trees growing, and up to an 80 percent die-off of the current Joshua Tree population. Which, as noted above, would severely impact numerous species. But biologist Jim Cornett claims there’s still hope.

“The good news is that humans have the capacity to slow down this rate of climate change and to minimize these impacts,” Cornett said. “Other animals don’t have that capacity. They’re helpless witnesses.”

photo credit: tomsaint11’s flickr photostream/Creative Commons