FAIRBANKS (Sputnik) — Denali National Park and Preserve is a six million acres national park and preserve in Alaska, surrounding Denali, the highest mountain in North America.
"Some of the plants that possibly might be affected are any alpine plants. For example, here in Denali we have the purple mountain saxifrage, the alpine azalea, and the arctic willow," Mahovlic said. "It's just that their habitat might be getting lost, because climate change is happening, and all of the plants that are low down are going to move up the mountainside, and it's going to get too warm for those plants."
Mahovlic also warned that a pika, a little animal of a rabbit family that looks like a mouse and lives in the high tundra areas, could become extinct at some point.
"Its habitat is getting overtaken by trees and shrubs as those trees and shrubs move up the hillsides because of climate change," she explained.
The national park representative also noted that the climate change is affecting the Denali park road.
"There are landslides on the park road and it's a big issue. Not tons of landslides but they have happened. There have been two within six years," she said. "So, it is a big issue, it's all climate change related."
Mahovlic spoke ahead of the Arctic Council Ministerial scheduled to take place on May 10-11 in Fairbanks, Alaska, and expressed hope that an issue of climate change will be top on the agenda.
"The climate change is definitely real. We need to get everyone on board with climate change. We need to give more specific guidelines for individual people as to what we can do to help our world and earth and our future generations," she said. "We need to have more awareness about climate change and also more funding for research."
Mahovlic also expressed hope that the US administration would realize that there is a climate change, which is human-caused, and that it has to be addressed now, not later.
During his election campaign, Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized warnings about global warming, saying it was a "Chinese hoax," and pledged to end US participation in the Paris climate deal on carbon emissions.
The Paris climate agreement within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, championed by former US President Barack Obama, was signed in 2015 by 194 countries and ratified by 143. It aims to hold the increase in average global temperature to below 2 degrees above pre-industrial level by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, with all the signatory states agreeing to reduce or limit their greenhouse gas emissions.
