题型：阅读理解 题类：常考题 难易度：普通
山东省枣庄市第八中学东校区2017-2018学年高二下学期英语6月月考试卷
In 1869, the Smiley family purchased an area of land about 100 miles north of New York City. Over time, some of their property and much of the surrounding landscape became the Mohonk Preserve, which has since grown to 8,000 acres and attracts visitors and rock climbers.
But the Mohonk Preserve also has a long scientific legacy. In the 1930s, Dan Smiley, a descendent of the original owners, began keeping track of the plants and animals that lived in the area.
Megan Napoli is a research ecologist with the Mohonk Preserve in New York. She thinks Smiley's efforts produced a rare long-term data set of observations, which is useful for studying the impacts of climate change. For instance, other research has shown that songbirds are migrating north earlier and earlier in the spring.
It's important for the birds to arrive at the proper time in the spring, because they need to time their arrival with the insect emergence. So they need to be here to establish their nesting sites, lay their eggs. Once the eggs hatch, they have their baby birds, so they need to time it when the insects are most abundant.
Napoli has begun analyzing about 76,000 observations of songbird migration dates collected by Smiley and his team to see if they, too, show that climate change has altered the timing of migrations. Her results suggest that they do.
Napoli found that short-distance migrants that spend their winters in the southern U. S. now arrive an average of eleven days earlier than they did in the 1930s. Long-distance migrants that overwinter in the tropics arrive roughly a week earlier. Napoli presented her results at a recent Ecological Society of America meeting in Portland, Oregon.
Meanwhile, who knows how many other long-term, personal data collections like Smiley's are out there, waiting to be discovered and to help improve official attempts to track the planet's changes.
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