The possibility that northern refugia for arctic and boreal biota existed in geographic regions other than Beringia during the ice ages has stimulated continuous debates among botanists, zoologists, and geologists. A voluminous literature has accumulated presenting biogeographic and other evidence to propose numerous high-latitude refugia, such as nunataks protruding above the ice caps and expo...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY Mountain plants are among the species most vulnerable to global warming, because of their isolation, narrow geographic distribution, and limited geographic range shifts. Stochastic and selective processes can act on the genome, modulating genetic structure and diversity. Fragmentation and historical processes also have a great influence on current genetic patterns, but the ...

Postglacial climate changes alter geographical distributions and diversity of species. Such ongoing changes often force species to migrate along the latitude/altitude. Altitudinal gradients represent assemblage of environmental, especially climatic, variable factors that influence the plant distributions. Global warming that triggered upward migrations has therefore impacted the alpine plants o...

most of the analyses and modeling concerning the mountain physical and human environmental changes have been based on theoretical speculation rather than scientific field observations. lack of standard observations and measurements in scattered and case specific monitoring programs offer only partially useful results for planning and management. all propositions and conclusions are hence mingle...

Objective: Himalayan mountain populations have been dependent upon indigenous plant resources for their health care for many years. Tribal women are interested in use of local herbs for cosmetic purposes. The present work is based on the results of research conducted on cosmetic uses of some important plants by the tribal women in District Poonch, Azad Kashmir Pakistan. Materials and Methods: A...

The geographic distribution of Astragalus (Fabaceae) in Iran was analyzed using a database of 7606 georeferencedobservations. Astragalus occurs in all provinces of Iran, but 88% ofthe observations are in five provinces including Tehran, West-Azerbaijan, Esfahan, Kordestan, and Khorasan-e Razavi.Most species are rare and narrowly endemic: Thelargest distance between two observations of the same ...

We used landscape genetics and statistical models to test how landscape features influence connectivity or create barriers to dispersal for a mountain riparian tree species, Euptelea pleiospermum. Young leaves from 1078 individuals belonging to 36 populations at elevations of 900-2000 m along upper reaches of four rivers were genotyped using eight nuclear microsatellite markers. We found no evi...