Vienna, December 22 2008
Dear GLORIA members, colleagues and friends,
another exciting year has passed and we, the Vienna GLORIA team, would like to briefly inform you about our progress and thank you for the very fruitful cooperation in the past 12 months!
2008 was the year of the first major resurvey of GLORIA sites across Europe, where 17 teams worked on a total of 68 summits between southern Spain and the northernmost Urals in Russia during the summer months June until September. Some changes in species cover were already apparent during fieldwork so that the just starting data analysis may yield some very interesting results. In addition to the resurvey, new 10x10m permanent plots for applying line-pointing techniques were setup; this may be considered as amendment to the GLORIA Multi-Summit-Approach. During the resurvey, the old temperature loggers were replaced by more precise and durable instruments.
Much support came from the Swiss MAVA Foundation for Nature Conservation and from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research. Further, the European Environment Agency is cooperating with GLORIA on developing an alpine plants indicator for warming-induced biodiversity losses.
The GLORIA network again has experienced a considerable expansion in North America and South America. The Second International GLORIA Workshop for the Andes just ended in Ecuador, where eight new GLORIA sites/target regions in South America were concretely planned. In Greenland, the first sites were established in the NE of the island. In Asia, Taiwanese and Japanese teams have started with setup or are about to join GLORIA. Site selection and preparatory work was made in Nepal and Sikkim/India for the setup campaign planned for 2009; more sites in the Hindukush-Himalaya region may appear. Globally, the network now consists more of than 60 active target regions.
Thank you for all your dedication and efforts in the GLORIA network!
