GLORIAGLO - Climate change impacts on global alpine plant diversity

Project Summary

Mountain habitats have been considered to being the most important refuges of species threatened through human land exploitation due to their difficult accessibility, topographic diversity and their global distribution. Climate change, however, especially in the form of an unabated rise in temperature caused by human activities is also affecting the wilderness areas of remote high mountain regions. For species living above the forest zone in the alpine and nival elevation belts, this creates a new component of threat that can lead to their extinction for the following reasons:

1. Typical high mountain species are adapted to cold conditions and lose their habitats due competitive displacement by species from lower elevations and in fewer cases due to direct warming effects.
2. Mountain species generally have much smaller distribution areas than species from lower altitudes and we expect that sufficiently cold refugial areas are often inadequate in terms of their surface area or the soil conditions required for colonization.
3. In mountains with isolated and small alpine areas, the proportion of local endemics (i.e. species that only occur within a small area) is often particularly high, which means that an increased risk of extinction can be assumed.

Against this background, the project GLORIAGLO aims at analysing the use data of the international GLORIA network, collected during the past 25 years with the participation of more than hundred research institutions worldwide.

This first worldwide GLORIA data analysis attempts to answer the following research questions:

1. Are changes in species numbers and their composition related to the regional rate of climate change?
2. Did the simultaneous occurrence of warming and increased drought stress lead to an increased loss of plant diversity?
3. Are small-ranged species of high mountains overrepresented among the disappearing species and large-ranged ones among the increasing species?

Vegetation data and time series of soil temperature from over a hundred study areas from six continents, combined with remote sensing data on seasonal changes in greenness and snow cover, topographical data as well as with gridded climate data series and the global distributions and ecological niches of species will be used in this global comparison of magnitudes and velocities of alpine biodiversity changes and their ecological drivers.

Project PI and partners

PI: Harald Pauli, GLORIA Coordination, Austrian Academy of Sciences (IGF) & BOKU University (OEKB);
partners: University of Vienna, University of Innsbruck

Funding

Austrian Science Fund (FWF) Principal Investigator Project (PAT5647124)

Duration

01.06.2025 - 31.05.2029