Shade avoidance in plants involves rapid shoot elongation to grow toward the light. Cell wall-modifying mechanisms are vital regulatory points for control of these elongation responses. Two protein families involved in cell wall modification are expansins and xyloglucan endotransglucosylase/hydrolases. We used an alpine and a prairie ecotype of Stellaria longipes differing in their response to ...

The ongoing climate warming has been reported to affect a broad range of organisms, and mountain ecosystems are considered to be particularly sensitive because they are limited by low temperatures. Meteorological data show an increased temperature for the alpine areas at Dovrefjell, Norway, causing a prolonged growing season and increased temperature sum. As part of the worldwide project Global...

While the upward shift of plant species has been observed on many alpine and nival summits, the reaction of the subalpine and lower alpine plant communities to the current warming and lower snow precipitation has been little investigated so far. To this aim, 63 old, exhaustive plant inventories, distributed along a subalpine-alpine elevation gradient of the Swiss Alps and covering different pla...

Alpine grasslands on the Tibetan Plateau are claimed to be sensitive and vulnerable to climate change and human disturbance. The mechanism, direction and magnitude of climatic and anthropogenic influences on net primary productivity (NPP) of various alpine pastures remain under debate. Here, we simulated the potential productivity (with only climate variables being considered as drivers; NPPP) ...

Here we studied the adaptation of plant communities to environment in the alpine belt of the Catalan Pyrenees through comparative analysis of plant traits. The starting point consisted of about 800 phytocoenological relevés from the Banc de Dades de Biodiversitat de Catalunya, which corresponded to 47 communities (associations and subassociations) and included 683 taxa. Eleven attributes were e...

In this paper we analyze the size and habitat partitioning of the vascular floras of five areas of the NE Iberian Peninsula, representing five distinct vegetation belts and three floristic regions: Mediterranean (basal belt), medio-European (submontane and montane belts) and Boreo-Alpine (subalpine and alpine belts). Each area covered over 1000 ha, and was fairly uniform in terms of potential v...

© WILDLIFE BIOLOGY · 9:4 (2003) In landscapes altered by human activities, many species are restricted to small patches of habitat. Species that were once common have decreased both in distribution and density, and many have become extinct (Ceballos & Ehrlich 2002), mainly due to habitat deterioration, loss and fragmentation (Hilton-Taylor 2000). Previously contiguous populations have been turn...

Using satellite-observed Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data and Rotated Empirical Orthogonal Function (REOF) method, we analyzed the spatio-temporal variation of vegetation during growing seasons from May to September in the Three-River Source Region, alpine meadow in the QinghaiTibetan Plateau from 1982 to 2006. We found that NDVI in the centre and east of the region, where the...

InSAR (space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry) data has revealed to be useful for surveying landslides and permafrost creeping features (e.g. rock glaciers) as it permits a time-lapse quantification of topography changes at mm to cm resolution over alpine areas where dense vegetation is no longer present. The capability of InSAR for detecting both the location of moving zones and t...