RED DESERT — Wildlife biologist Tom Christiansen stood atop a ridge and gestured to a sea of sagebrush stretching south for miles before giving way to open patches of ancient seabed dirt and the vast Killpecker Sand Dunes.

All manner of plant and wildlife that reside in Wyoming’s Red Desert are adept at surviving the area’s sparse precipitation, poor soils and seasonal extremes. But a warming climate threatens to push this place to the brink of cascading degradation, Christiansen explained to a group of journalists during a tour of the desert by wing, tire and boot earlier this month.

“Normally, we’d have 80 or 90 fawns for every 100 [pronghorn] does,” he said, noting the ratio is down by about one-third for the Sublette Herd.

“There’s example after example of this kind of stuff, and yo

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