Abstract
Under the contemporary climate change, the Himalaya is reported to be warming at a much higher rate than the global average. However, little is known about the alpine vegetation responses to recent climate change in the rapidly warming Himalaya. Here we studied vegetation dynamics on alpine summits in Kashmir Himalaya in relation to in situ measured microclimate. The summits, representing an elevation gradient from treeline to nival zone (3530–3740 m), were first surveyed in 2014 and then re-surveyed in 2018. The initial survey showed that the species richness, vegetation cover and soil temperature decreased with increasing elevation. Species richness and soil temperature differed significantly among slopes, with east and south slopes showing higher values than north and west slopes. The re-survey showed that species richness increased on the lower three summits but decreased on the highest summit (nival zone) and also revealed a substantial increase in the cover of dominant shrubs, graminoids, and forbs. The nestedness-resultant dissimilarity, rather than species turnover, contributed more to the magnitude of β-diversity among the summits. High temporal species turnover was found on south and east aspects, while high nestedness was recorded along north and west aspects. Thermophilization was more pronounced on the lower two summits and along the northern aspects. Our study provides crucial scientific data on climate change impacts on the alpine vegetation of Kashmir Himalaya. This information will fill global knowledge gaps from the developing world.
Highlights
Biological consequences of climate warming are becoming increasingly obvious across a wide range of ecosystems (Woodward et al, 2010; Bellard et al, 2012; Grimm et al, 2013; García et al, 2018)
The results revealed that the south and east aspects of all of the summits showed only replacement of species between 2014 and 2018, with highest turnover observed for east aspect of GUL1, thereby implying that no significant species loss or gain has occurred on these aspects during a span of five years
Contemporary climate warming is considered as the key driver of recent shifts in alpine plant distributions (Gottfried et al, 2012; De Frenne et al, 2013; Steinbauer et al, 2018)
Summary
Biological consequences of climate warming are becoming increasingly obvious across a wide range of ecosystems (Woodward et al, 2010; Bellard et al, 2012; Grimm et al, 2013; García et al, 2018). Alpine ecosystems in particular are considered to be highly sensitive to global warming as they are generally adapted to lower temperature regimes (Körner, 2003; Chersich et al, 2015; Elmendorf et al, 2015). Despite their extreme environmental conditions, alpine ecosystems harbor rich biodiversity with a high degree of endemism (Gehrke and Linder, 2014; Smycka et al, 2017; Noroozi et al, 2018). Alpine ecosystems can serve as best natural experimental systems to investigate the climate change-induced impacts on biological communities (Grabherr et al, 2010; Malanson et al, 2011), and these relatively pristine ecosystems can provide credible scientific evidence for detection of initial-warning signals of climate change (Wolf et al, 2012)
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