Recent Plant Diversity Changes on Europe’s Mountain Summits

By H. Pauli, M. Gottfried, S. Dullinger, O. Abdaladze, M. Akhalkatsi, J. L. Alonso, G. Coldea, J. Dick, B. Erschbamer, Rosa Fernández Calzado and 22 more. Science, 2012

912 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Climb Every Mountain Mountaintop floras across Europe appear to be responding to climatic change in terms of upslope species range shifts. Pauli et al. (p. 353) systematically analyzed data gathered from standardized permanent plots on 66 high-mountain environments across Europe. On average, mountaintop species numbers have increased significantly during the last decade. However, this increase is a net effect of gains and losses, with losses particularly affecting mountains of Mediterranean regions and their endemic species. This turnover is largely consistent with model predictions and indicates that high-altitude species, and in particular the rich endemic alpine flora of many Mediterranean mountain ranges, will come under increasing pressure in the predicted warmer and drier climates in this region. European mountaintop flower species richness is increasing on northern summits but decreasing on southern summits. In mountainous regions, climate warming is expected to shift species’ ranges to higher altitudes. Evidence for such shifts is still mostly from revisitations of historical sites. We present recent (2001 to 2008) changes in vascular plant species richness observed in a standardized monitoring network across Europe’s major mountain ranges. Species have moved upslope on average. However, these shifts had opposite effects on the summit floras’ species richness in boreal-temperate mountain regions (+3.9 species on average) and Mediterranean mountain regions (–1.4 species), probably because recent climatic trends have decreased the availability of water in the European south. Because Mediterranean mountains are particularly rich in endemic species, a continuation of these trends might shrink the European mountain flora, despite an average increase in summit species richness across the region.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b5e6803b306cbf0cce4ac8e3444f32b50dc99db2

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Citations in the corpus

The silent extinction: climate change and the potential hybridization-mediated extinction of endemic high-mountain plants (2015, background): “2011), a prediction that has recently been confirmed with empirical evidence not just for the Spanish Sierra Nevada but also for many other European mountains (Lenoir et al. 2008; Pauli et al. 2012).”
The oldest monitoring site of the Alps revisited: accelerated increase in plant species richness on Piz Linard summit since 1835 (2013, background): “…seed vectors such as mountaineers and ibex have strongly increased on summits, and because species’ upper distribution limits, and thus, potential source populations are extending towards higher elevations, too (Grabherr et al. 1994; Walther et al. 2005; Frei et al. 2010; Pauli et al. 2012).”
The rich sides of mountain summits – a pan‐European view on aspect preferences of alpine plants (2016, background): “In recent periods of amplified climate warming (Mountain Research Initiative E. D. W. Working Group, 2015), ‘thermophilisation’ of alpine vegetation (Gottfried et al., 2012) and upward shifts of species ranges (Pauli et al., 2012) have been observed.”
The performance of protected areas for biodiversity under climate change (2015, background): “, 2009), and montane plants have moved to higher elevations on mountain summits in PAs in Europe (Pauli et al., 2012).”
Climate‐driven change in plant–insect interactions along elevation gradients (2014, background): “Among the well-documented responses to global warming are organisms’ range shifts to higher latitudes and altitudes (Grabherr, Gottfried & Pauli 1994; Parmesan 1996; Stange & Ayres 2001; Hoegh-Guldberg et al. 2008; Burrows et al. 2011; Pateman et al. 2012; Pauli et al. 2012).”
Mediterranean island biodiversity and climate change: the last 10,000 years and the future (2016, background): “A likely explanation is that recent climatic trends have decreased the availability of water in the European south (Pauli et al. 2012).”
Accelerated increase in plant species richness on mountain summits is linked to warming (2018, positive): “The current accelerating trend in temperature increase 1,6 should therefore also affect the velocity of changes observed for mountain biota.”
Plant and fungal use in Tusheti, Khevsureti, and Pshavi, Sakartvelo (Republic of Georgia), Caucasus (2016, background): “However, climate change is affecting both floristic diversity in the wild and in gardens, both in the Caucasus as well as continent wide [62,63].”