The hills are alive – with a changing plant mix,January 14, 2012 — andyextance

The hills are alive – with a changing plant mix

January 14, 2012 — Andy extant

 

Higher temperatures could lead plants living at the top of Europe’s mountains to decline and disappear, as they face greater competition with plants from warmer, lower levels. That’s one finding from surveys of 17 mountain areas conducted by 17 different research teams, co-ordinates by Harald Paul from the University of Vienna and Austrian Academy of Sciences. Comparing surveys performed in 2008 and 2001 shows that changes are already happening across the continent, and faster than the scientists might have thought. “Alpine vegetation often is given aee dramatic changes over decades,” Paul said. “Based on previous studies, we did expect that species composition will change, but not that we would get a significant signal after just 7 yes.”s an example of a highly resilient ecosystem, with slow-growing but long-lived plants that may not s

surveys to collect long-term measurements on what climate change is doing to mountain plant

The idea to perform regular ss came during the 1990s, when such studies were still rare. Pauli and his colleagues were comparing modern species numbers in mountains with those measured by botanists 50-100 or more years earlier. They found more species than had been previously able to live there, but data were patchy and limited to the Alps and Scandinavia. “This obvious scarcity of comparable data from permanent plots across many mountain systems led to the establishment of the GLORIA network around the turn of the century,” Paul said.

On  four coach summing-up points, a cluster of four 1 x 1m monitoring plots was installed. Plant cover was surveyed for each plot, and soil temperature was recorded hourly from 2001-2007. Credit: Nature/GLORIA

For a paper published in Nature Climate Change last week, 32 GLORIA scientists from 13 countries used the same methods to study 867 vegetation samples from 60 different mountain tops. The group was divided into teams based near the mountair methods relied on visually estimating how much of the area of marked-out and temperature range they studied, meaning they had the best knowledge of nth local plants. Their-monitored plots on each mountain is covered by each different type of plat. “The basic unit is a 1 x 1 me square plot – four such plots are arranged in each compass point of each summit site, making 16 such plots per summit,” Paul explained. “The distribution of the plots over all main compass directions should result in a maximum coverage of vegetation types that occur on a summit site.”