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Elevation matters: contrasting effects of climate change on the vegetation development at different elevations in the Bavarian Alps

  • VEGETATION IN COLD ENVIRONMENTS UNDER CLIMATE CHANGE
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Abstract

Despite broad evidence that recent climate change considerably affects alpine-nival vegetation, there are only a few studies revealing climate-induced vegetation changes in all vegetation belts above the actual treeline. Here, we use historical and recent vegetation surveys from the Bavarian Alps (Germany) to examine biodiversity, structural and functional trait composition changes in subalpine, lower and higher alpine vegetation belts during the past 50 years. Although species richness did not change significantly in dense subalpine vegetation, immigration of species from lower elevations and increased environmental favorability for already present thermophilic species led to an increase of plant cover (+23 %). In low alpine plots, a significant increase in species richness and plant cover (+41 and +18 %, respectively) was detected, due to gap availability and low competitive ability of alpine species. The results of the three-table ordination technique (RLQ) revealed that in subalpine and low alpine plots species with traits that are advantageous under warmer conditions, such as higher specific leaf area, high stature and heavier seeds, significantly increased their frequencies and abundances. Floristic and vegetation changes of high alpine plots were contrasting to those found in the subalpine and the low alpine vegetation located both in the study region and close mountain ridges. Despite the temperature increase and sufficient availability of colonisation gaps for newcomers, species richness (−24 %) and plant cover (−25 %) significantly decreased, probably due to permafrost degradation (as a consequence of recent warming). Our results suggest that considering vegetation characteristics as well as environmental conditions of different vegetation belts above the treeline is critical to accurately understand the response of alpine vegetation to climate change.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Inge Lauer, Martin Leipold and Florian Neumaier for their help with trait measurements and Sabine Fischer for the preparation of Fig. 1. We acknowledge Franziska Bucher and three anonymous referees for their useful comments and suggestions on a previous version of this article. We also thank Stephan Gruber for the consultations on permafrost occurrence in the Alps. Accommodation and access to the study sites was provided by the National Park Berchtesgaden. The research funding was provided by the FORKAST project (TP 12 Poschlod) which was financed by the Ministry of Environment and of Science in Bavaria. We thank Wolfgang Lippert whose vegetation survey in the 1960ies made this study possible.

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  1. Markus Bernhardt-Römermann

    Present address: Institute of Ecology, Friedrich Schiller University, 07743, Jena, Germany

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  1. Institute of Botany, University of Regensburg, 9304, Regensburg, Germany

    Sergey Rosbakh, Markus Bernhardt-Römermann & Peter Poschlod

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  1. Sergey Rosbakh
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This article is part of the special issue Vegetation in cold environments under climate change.

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Supplementary material 1 (PDF 79 kb) Appendix 1. Environmental characteristics of the collection sites

Supplementary material 2 (PDF 40 kb)Appendix 2. Detrended correspondence analysis (DCA) ordination of the studied plots

35_2014_139_MOESM3_ESM.pdf

Supplementary material 3 (PDF 36 kb)Appendix 3. Clusters and their corresponding species obtained by k-mean clustering of species scores of RLQ technique

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Rosbakh, S., Bernhardt-Römermann, M. & Poschlod, P. Elevation matters: contrasting effects of climate change on the vegetation development at different elevations in the Bavarian Alps. Alp Botany 124, 143–154 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00035-014-0139-6

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