Abstract
Monitoring of plant succession in glacier forelands has so far been restricted to field sampling. In this study, in situ vegetation sampling along a chronosequence between Little Ice Age (LIA) maximum extent and the recent glacier terminus at Jamtalferner in the Austrian Alps is compared to time series of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) calculated from 13 Landsat scenes (1985–2016). The glacier terminus positions at 16 dates between the LIA maximum and 2015 were analysed from historical maps, orthophotos and LiDAR images. We sampled plots of different ages since deglaciation, from very recent to approx. 150 years: after 100 years, roughly 80% of the ground is covered by plants and ground cover does not increase significantly thereafter. The number of species increases from 10–20 species on young sites to 40–50 species after 100 years. The NDVI increases with the time of exposure from a mean of 0.11 for 1985–1991 to 0.20 in 2009 and 0.27 in 2016. As the increase in ground cover is clearly reproduced by the NDVI (R² ground cover/NDVI 0.84) – even for sparsely vegetated areas –, we see a great potential of satellite-borne NDVI to perform regional characterizations of glacier forelands for hydrological, ecological and hazard management-related applications.
Highlights
Monitoring of plant succession in glacier forelands has so far been restricted to field sampling
This paper aims to improve our understanding of the environmental conditions and the pace and delays in biotic response to changes in climate and glaciation by introducing and validating a new method to map biotic succession on a regional scale
Species reported for the area between the Little Ice Age (LIA) terminal moraine and the ice margin at that time, i.e. for the first decades after deglaciation, include Ranunculus glacialis, Linaria alpina, Arabis alpina, Leucanthemopsis (=Chrysanthemum) alpinum, Achillea atrata, Hieracium alpinum, Salix herbacea, Saxifraga biflora, S. aspera, www.nature.com/scientificreports
Summary
Monitoring of plant succession in glacier forelands has so far been restricted to field sampling. This paper aims to improve our understanding of the environmental conditions and the pace and delays in biotic response to changes in climate and glaciation by introducing and validating a new method to map biotic succession on a regional scale This will improve the study of glaciological dendrochronological records by estimating the pace of past plant growth. For the interpretation of dendrochronological and other biotic paleodata in glacier forelands, knowledge of the time required for different species and/or life forms to develop is an important constraint Motivated by these two facts, the study at hand investigates a chronosequence in the paraglacial glacier foreland of Jamtalferner in the Austrian part of the Silvretta to compile a data base for further analysis www.nature.com/scientificreports/. Www.nature.com/scientificreports of the glacier-climate-plant succession interactions at the site and use this data base to verify the results of a remote-sensing approach and to pave the ground for adding further sites to a regional data base
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