Abstract
Since the Little Ice Age maximum in mid-nineteenth century, glaciers of the Alps lost more than half of their respective area. The chance to observe primary succession in deglaciated areas has motivated researchers ever since with quite a number of studies on vegetation dynamics in glacier forelands dating back to the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Harsh site conditions make glacier forelands challenging environments for the colonization. Due to high mortality rates during establishment, plant colonization and vegetation dynamics in glacier forelands are commonly considered slow and delayed. Recent research, however, shows that primary succession of plants in glacier forelands is accelerated, most likely due to climate warming. This is demonstrated by a speedup of the colonization process itself as well as by changed colonization strategies of the plant species involved. Employing a virtually complete species list for 1911 provided by Raimund v. Klebelsberg and our data collected along a chronosequence roughly a century later, we compare the floristic composition and structural attributes of the plant species governing primary succession within the glacier foreland of Lenksteinferner (ferner is a Tyrolean toponym for glacier) (South Tyrol, Italy). We address questions of changes in the dynamics of colonization, the plant species involved and their respective biological traits. Our study confirms that present-day vegetation dynamics in the glacier foreland are accelerated, colonization occurs faster and more species are involved in early colonization than a century ago. However, the dominant early colonizers are essentially the same and there are no fundamental differences concerning the spectra of biological traits between the two sampling dates. Altered colonization strategies due to climate change could not be detected within the glacier foreland of the Lenksteinferner, probably due to a compensation of climate warming during the twentieth century by the shift of the glacier terminus to a higher elevation. As the difference in temperature between the two sampling areas matches the magnitude of warming between the two sampling dates, similar temperature conditions in front of the glacier terminus today and at Klebelsberg’s times can be assumed.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Dr. Stefan Klotz (UFZ Leipzig) for providing the access code to the BiolFlor database. Helpful comments of three anonymous reviewers and the Editor-in-Chief of Alpine Botany, Dr. Jürg Stöcklin, on earlier drafts greatly improved the manuscript. The authors are also very grateful to Dr. Donald Friend (Minnesota State University, Mankato, USA) for valuable linguistic advice.
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T.F. designed the study. T.F. and F.G. performed botanical data sampling and analyses, B.D. performed the reconstruction of the glacial history of Lenksteinferner. All authors contributed to manuscript writing.
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35_2016_179_MOESM1_ESM.jpg
S1 Monthly and mean annual vertical temperature lapse rates and elevations of 0°C-isotherm based on data of nine meteorological stations in the Rieserferner group and adjacent areas for the period 1994–2004 (according to Damm and Felderer 2013) (JPEG 463 kb)
35_2016_179_MOESM2_ESM.jpg
S2 Species list for the entire chronosequence in the glacier foreland of Lenksteinferner, grey columns are disregarded here, as they do match neither site age nor location of the Klebelsberg data (JPEG 7562 kb)
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Fickert, T., Grüninger, F. & Damm, B. Klebelsberg revisited: did primary succession of plants in glacier forelands a century ago differ from today?. Alp Botany 127, 17–29 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00035-016-0179-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00035-016-0179-1