Abstract
The alpine belt hosts the treeless vegetation above the high elevation climatic treeline. The way alpine plants manage to thrive in a climate that prevents tree growth is through small stature, apt seasonal development, and ‘managing’ the microclimate near the ground surface. Nested in a mosaic of micro-environmental conditions, these plants are in a unique position by a close-by neighborhood of strongly diverging microhabitats. The range of adjacent thermal niches that the alpine environment provides is exceeding the worst climate warming scenarios. The provided mountains are high and large enough, these are conditions that cause alpine plant species diversity to be robust against climatic change. However, the areal extent of certain habitat types will shrink as isotherms move upslope, with the potential areal loss by the advance of the treeline by far outranging the gain in new land by glacier retreat globally.
Highlights
The alpine world covers a small land fraction, since mountains get narrower with elevation [1]
The debate on alpine biodiversity under global change has suffered from various assumptions and confusions, and in particular from the restriction to climatic warming
In the case of climatic warming, a classical assumption was that alpine plant life prior to climatic warming was constrained by low temperature (‘stressed’ alpine plants)
Summary
The alpine world covers a small land fraction, since mountains get narrower with elevation [1]. 2.6% of the terrestrial area outside Antarctica meets the criteria for ‘alpine’ [2,3], a terrain still including a lot of barren or glaciated areas, with the actual plant covered area closer to 2% (an example for the Eastern Alps in [4]). The alpine world clearly facilitates high biodiversity. In part, this holds the answer to why alpine terrain is a relatively safe place when it comes to coping with climatic change [6]. Due to the geographical distribution of mountains, the highest alpine plant species richness occurs at mid latitude, that is the temperate zone [7]. Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
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