The Hengduan Mountains, with a distinct altitudinal differentiation and strong vertical vegetation zonation, occupy an important position in southwestern China as a global hotspot of biodiversity. Pollen analysis of lake sediments sampled along an altitudinal gradient in this region helps us to understand how this vegetation zonation arose and how it has responded to climate change and human im...

Altitude is a determining factor of ecosystem properties and processes in mountains. This study investigated the changes in the concentrations of carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P) and their ratios in four key ecosystem components (forest floor litter, fine roots, soil, and soil microorganisms) along an altitudinal gradient (from 50 m to 950 m a.s.l.) in subtropical China. The results...

Abstract Studies of future 21 st century climate warming in lakes along altitudinal gradients have been partially obscured by local atmospheric phenomena unresolved models. Here we forced the physical lake model Simstrat with locally downscaled models under three scenarios to investigate impact on 29 Swiss lakes, varying size an gradient. Results from worst-case scenario project substantial cha...

In this paper we report about 88 longhorned beetles (Cerambycidae) species found in 6929 hectares and distributed along an altitudinal gradient of 1500 m of an Italian alpine valley (Val Genova, central-eastern Italian Alps). The species richness, result merging data from sixty years (1947-2007) of entomological surveys, corresponds to the 32% of the Italian cerambycid fauna confirming the high...

Stream water dissolved organic carbon (DOC) correlates positively with soil organic carbon (SOC) in many biomes. Does this relationship hold in a small geographic region when variations of temperature, precipitation and vegetation are driven by a significant altitudinal gradient? We examined the spatial connectivity between concentrations of DOC in headwater stream and contents of riparian SOC ...

To understand the morphological and physiological responses of leaves to changes in altitudinal gradients, we examined ten morphological and physiological characteristics in one-year-old needles of Picea schrenkiana var. tianschanica at ten points along an altitudinal gradient from 1420 to 2300 m a.s.l. on the northern slopes of the Tianshan Mountains in northwest China. Our results indicated t...

Population cycles of the winter moth (Operophtera brumata) in sub-arctic coastal birch forests show high spatiotemporal variation in amplitude. Peak larval densities range from levels causing little foliage damage to outbreaks causing spatially extensive defoliation. Moreover, outbreaks typically occur at or near the altitudinal treeline. It has been hypothesized that spatiotemporal variation i...