Research overview: snowshoe hare cycles, climate, and lynx population dynamics

Canada lynx populations track the famous boom-bust cycle of snowshoe hare, so anything that alters hare dynamics propagates to the predator. This overview surveys how climate change may affect the hare cycle through shifts in vegetation, predation risk, and crucially the seasonal mismatch when hares molt to white coats before snow arrives, leaving them conspicuous on brown ground. It reviews how such coat-color mismatch and altered hare survival could dampen or destabilize the cycles that lynx depend on. The synthesis frames lynx climate vulnerability as partly mediated through prey, explaining why hare ecology features prominently in projections of northern lynx persistence.