Species range shifts have been well studied in light of rising global temperatures and the role climate plays in restricting species distribution. In mountain regions, global trends show upward elevational shifts of altitudinal treelines. However, there is significant variation in response between geographic locations driven by climatic and habitat heterogeneity and biotic interactions. Accurat...

We report evidence of adaptive evolution in juvenile development time on a decadal timescale for the cinnabar moth Tyria jacobaeae (Lepidoptera: Arctiidae) colonizing new habitats and hosts from the Willamette Valley to the Coast Range and Cascades Mountains in Oregon. Four lines of evidence reveal shorter egg to pupa juvenile development times evolved in the mountains, where cooler temperature...

Tamborine Mountain is a 25 square kilometre plateau located within the urban-rural fringe of the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. Renowned for its superb climate, spectacular views, lush farmland and subtropical rainforest, Tamborine Mountain offers a wide variety of nature-based tourism activities such as bushwalking, rainforest appreciation and wine tasting. This phenomenon requires the har...

Mountains, especially in the tropics, harbour a unique and large portion of the world's biodiversity. Their geographical isolation, limited range size and unique environmental adaptations make montane species potentially the most threatened under impeding climate change. Here, we provide a global baseline assessment of geographical range contractions and extinction risk of high-elevation specia...

Mountain forests, treeline ecotones included, provide numerous ecosystem services. However, different drivers heavily impact the treeline areas, in particular anthropogenic pressure and climate change. Any change affecting the aboveground portion of terrestrial ecosystems automatically influences their belowground part, i.e. soil and soil organisms. Therefore, the focus of the present paper is ...

Traditional detrending methods assign equal mean value to all tree-ring series for chronology developments, despite that the mean annual growth changes in different time periods. We find that the strength of a tree-ring model can be improved by giving more weights to tree-ring series that have a stronger climate signal and less weight to series that have a weaker signal. We thus present an ense...

[1] Dating of gravel-capped strath terraces in basins adjacent to western U.S. Laramide Ranges is one approach to document the history of late Cenozoic fluvial exhumation. We use in situ Be measurements to date the broad surfaces adjacent to the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, and compare these calculated ages with results from meteoric Be measurements. We analyze three sites n...

—Temperature is a critical factor in the distribution of stream fishes. From laboratory studies of thermal tolerance, fish ecologists can assess whether species distributions are constrained by tolerable thermal habitat availability. The objective of this study was to use lethal thermal maxima (LTM) methodology to assess the upper thermal tolerance for mountain sucker Catostomus platyrhynchus, ...

The Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC), a participant in the Mountain Partnership Consortium (MPC), provided financial support for undertaking the study. The views expressed in this document are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of their organizations or of SDC. The mountains of the Hindu Kush Himalayas (HKH) are abundant in natural resources. These unique landscap...

The forests of Central Europe play an important role in the retention of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Carbon sequestration is rarely the main objective of forest management and is often an underappreciated by-effect of practical forest management, whereas timber production and protection against natural hazards in mountain regions are the main forest functions. Climate change is expected to alte...