Worldwide, changing climates and land use practices are escalating woody-plants encroachment into grasslands, reducing biodiversity and altering ecosystem functions. The loss of alpine grasslands is a major conservation concern as they harbor many rare and endemic species. Alpine meadows in Northwest Yunnan, China, represent a global biodiversity hotspot with high species richness, beta diversi...

Question: Have recent increases in temperature caused a decline in arctic-alpine plants at the southern margin of their range? Location: Above tree line; Glacier National Park, Montana, western USA. Methods: We monitored the abundance of seven arctic-alpine vascular plants at or near the southern limits of their ranges at three sites in Glacier National Park, Montana from 1989 through 2002. In ...

Alpine grazing reduces blazing’ is a widely and strongly held view concerning the effects of livestock grazing on fuels, and therefore fire behaviour and impact, in Australia’s high country landscapes. As a test of this hypothesis, we examined the patterns of burning across the alpine (treeless) landscapes of the Bogong High Plains in Victoria, following the extensive fires of January 2003. Dat...

The Pyrenees is a large mountain system stretching over the Iberian isthmus, and thus encompassing three distinct vegetation regions: medio-European, Mediterranean and Alpine. It includes contrasting landscapes in accordance with this large-scale pattern and also with smaller scales related to continentality, bedrock type, landform and ancient anthropic land use. The northern side and the weste...

Primary Production and Precipitation Knapp and Smith (1) suggested that interannual variability in aboveground net primary production (ANPP) is not related to fluctuations in precipitation, based on analysis of data from 11 Long-Term Ecological Research sites across North America. This finding, if applicable to other regions, is crucial to climate change research, because it may necessitate rev...

Conservation of biodiversity may in the future increasingly depend upon the availability of scientific information to set suitable restoration targets. In traditional paleoecology, sediment-based pollen provides a means to define preanthropogenic impact conditions, but problems in establishing the exact provenance and ecologically meaningful levels of taxonomic resolution of the evidence are li...

Abstract. The interannual variability of snow cover in alpine areas is increasing, which may affect the tightly coupled cycles carbon and water through snow–vegetation–atmosphere interactions across a range spatio-temporal scales. To explore role for land–atmosphere exchange CO2 vapor tundra ecosystems, we combined 3 years (2019–2021) continuous eddy covariance flux measurements net ecosystem (...

[1] Soil surface temperature is a critical boundary condition for the simulation of soil temperature by environmental models. It is influenced by atmospheric and soil conditions and by vegetation cover. In sophisticated land surface models, it is simulated iteratively by solving surface energy budget equations. In ecosystem, permafrost, and hydrology models, the consideration of soil surface te...