ID: 613 / 172

Category: Symposia

Track: Pending

Proposed Symposium Title: CLIMATE CHANGE EFFECTS ON ALPINE PLANT SPECIES AND COMMUNITIES: INSIGHTS FROM THE GLORIA NETWORK

Abstract: Anthropogenic climate change will lead to a considerable increase in global mean temperature with high-elevation and high-latitude ecosystems experiencing even stronger warming. This is associated with glacier melting, permafrost thawing, decreasing snow cover, longer growing seasons and higher frequency of early and late frost events. In remote alpine environments, climate change impacts are less confounded by other components of global change such as land-use change, making them an ideal study system to assess the impacts of climate change on terrestrial biota early on. Cold-adapted plant species have already been responding to climate change: Ranges of alpine plant species have shifted towards higher elevations. Higher competitive pressure from subalpine species and unsuitable climatic conditions are expected to lead to local extinctions of cold-adapted species in the future. Evidences of decreasing abundances of these species already act as an early warning signal. Furthermore, tree line advance and shrubification will most likely lead to a substantial loss of alpine habitat area with associated extinction risks of the endemic alpine flora restricted to low-elevation marginal mountain ranges. Species that do not migrate fast enough or are already at the highest elevations need to adapt to changing environmental conditions but models predict a slow evolutionary response of alpine plants. The Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments (GLORIA, www.gloria.ac.at) is the only operating standardized international program monitoring responses of alpine plant communities to climate change. The network was established around the turn of the millennium and is represented today in ~130 mountain regions on all populated continents. In this session we show how GLORIA has contributed to the understanding of changes in alpine biodiversity elements in response to climate warming, including alpine plant species diversity, abundance and composition.

Speaker 1: Francisco Cuesta Dirección General de Investigación y Vinculación (DGIV), Universidad de Las Américas, Ecuador francisco.cuesta@udla.edu.ec Taxonomic and functional diversity of Andean mountain summits

Speaker 2: Alba Gutiérrez-Girón Dept. of Pharmacology, Pharmacognosy and Botany, Faculty of Pharmacy, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain algutier@ucm.es Plant ecology of Mediterranean high-mountains and GLORIA: two decades of research synergies

Speaker 3: Silvano Lodetti Dept. of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Pavia, Italy silvano.lodetti01@universitadipavia.it Alpine plant diversity and species-specific changes within the Italian GLORIA network over a long-term monitoring in the last 20 years

Topics (Up to three): Global Change Ecology

Topic 2: Ecology and Plant Communities

Topic 3: Conservation Biology

Justification: The conservation of terrestrial ecosystems and their biodiversity is an integral part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 15: life on land) and the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. To reach these targets, knowledge about the conservation status and global change impacts on species and communities is an essential prerequisite. Long-term monitoring as conducted within the international GLORIA network (Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments) has contributed to the understanding and identification of early warning signals of climate change impacts on alpine plant species biodiversity. In this symposium we provide a synopsis of the past 20 years of GLORIA monitoring.