A plant point of view: Alpine Plant Life: Functional Plant Ecology of High Mountain Ecosystems by C. Körner

Abstract

Springer-Verlag, 1999. £37.50/$64.95 pbk (ix+343 pages)ISBN 3 540 65438 0Alpine plants hold a fascination for many people, as a browse through the gardening section of your local bookshop will no doubt attest. In the preface to this book, Korner acknowledges such fascination for plants as a stimulus for his own early interest in botany and biology. However, where gardening books and most previous texts dealing with the ecology of alpine vegetation are of a mainly descriptive nature, Alpine Plant Life presents a clear, often quantitative exploration of the interactions between plants and the spectrum of physical conditions they encounter in high mountain environments.The book is a new and innovative contribution to alpine ecology. Although the interface between vegetation and the physical environment has been well researched under field and laboratory conditions in a wide variety of habitats, and is to be regarded as part of classic plant ecology, Korner’s approach is refreshing in its concentration upon the plant point of view. For example, on the first page of Chapter 1 the reader is reminded that conditions usually regarded by us as harsh might not be so for plants, and indeed might not even be experienced at the microlevel of the individual plant or leaf. Similarly, the differences for plants between high mountain (alpine) and high latitude (tundra) environments are highlighted at an early stage. This is a welcome change from the traditional, and misleading, tendency to treat these two types of environment as broadly similar, merely because they are both cold.Although there is no formal division of chapters into thematic sections, the author defines the tone of the book in Chapters 1–3 by outlining the general physical constraints on life in high mountains, and by providing a geographical and historical overview of research, with accounts of the alpine life zone and alpine climates. Serious consideration of the plant viewpoint begins in Chapter 4 – ‘The climate plants experience’. From here, we are led through accounts of life under snow, the formation and structure of alpine soils, and the intricacies of treelines, to a series of chapters dealing with plant stress factors and resources, including solar radiation, water, minerals and carbon. Subsequent chapters include discussions of plant growth dynamics, cell division and tissue formation, biomass production, reproduction and finally global change at high altitudes. Although the order of presentation of topics might lose its logical thread in some places, this is made up for by the breadth of coverage of the subject matter. The synthesis of evidence and ideas provides a new insight as to how the variety of sizes, growth forms, rooting systems, flowers and physiological peculiarities of alpine plants evolved.In discussing many of his topics, Korner strikes a useful balance between consideration of the roles of plants in cycling substances through mountain ecosystems and description of the plant physiological processes involved. Just as impressive is the integration of general information to enable elaboration of the intricacies of the more specialized situation in mountain systems. The success of this strategy is particularly apparent in the chapters dealing with water relations and climatic stress from solar radiation, but is also to be found throughout the book.My single major criticism of the work is that in the end, the reader is presented with only half of the story. In spite of the all-encompassing title, this book is not a useful source of reference if you wish to know about organism interactions involving plants in mountain ecosystems. Plant competition, population and community dynamics, succession and plant–animal interactions are all untouched. Token accounts of the roles of microbes and mycorryhiza, and of animals as pollinators or herbivores, do little to inform the reader in these directions. The deficit is partly a consequence of insufficient alpine research worldwide, but it also reflects the author’s own focus of interests and expertise in the physical aspects of alpine plant ecology. The situation reaches an extreme in the final short chapter on ‘Global change at high elevation’. I remain unconvinced that it is helpful to write a chapter on plants and environmental change on mountains (or, indeed, anywhere else) without ever mentioning succession – a process, by definition, synonymous with organism, particularly vegetational, reactions to environmental disturbance in the widest sense1xPlants in Changing Environments: Linking Physiological, Population and Community Ecology. Bazzaz, F.A. See all