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Impact of climate change on alpine plant community in Qilian Mountains of China

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Abstract

There is growing evidence that mountains are experiencing some of the highest rates of climate warming, but assessment of the ecological impacts of climate change is often limited due to a lack of long-term monitoring data for comparative study in many ecosystems. In this study, we present an empirical work for assessing ecological responses with botanical legacy data in the Qilian Mountains of China. Plot-scale and transect-wide survey was conducted for alpine shrub communities along an elevational gradient 20 years ago. Recently, we resampled the permanent plots to investigate how the community changes may be linked to climatic variability. We found no significant temporal shifts in species richness; but the community structure underwent substantial changes, as indicated by visible shifts in the relative density of dominant shrub species and the frequency of occurrence of understory herbaceous species. This reshuffling of plant community composition reflected a series of complex responses to climate change. Specifically, wet-demanding species have become more frequent due to the recently enhanced precipitation, while the replacement of some low-statured plants with different requirements for light was indirectly regulated by climate warming via reshaping the altitudinal patterns of dominant shrubs. Climate-mediated shifts in shrub species distribution altered the expected evolutional trajectory of alpine community, which increased the complexity and nonlinearity of the responses of the communities at different altitudes to climatic variability. Our results suggested that in-depth knowledge of indirect effects can facilitate to lessen the uncertainty in predicting future community dynamics in a changing climate.

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Acknowledgements

We are very thankful to the editor, Scott C. Sheridan, and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedbacks and insightful comments on our manuscript. We acknowledge all participants in the field investigation.

Funding

This work was supported by the Foundation for Excellent Youth Scholars of “Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources,” Chinese Academy of Sciences (Y751E81001).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Linze Inland River Basin Research Station, Chinese Ecosystem Research Network, Lanzhou, 730000, China

    Jun Du, Zhibin He, Longfei Chen, Pengfei Lin, Xi Zhu & Quanyan Tian

  2. Key Laboratory of Ecohydrology of Inland River Basin, Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou, 730000, China

    Jun Du, Zhibin He, Longfei Chen, Pengfei Lin, Xi Zhu & Quanyan Tian

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  1. Jun Du
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  2. Zhibin He
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Correspondence to Zhibin He.

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Du, J., He, Z., Chen, L. et al. Impact of climate change on alpine plant community in Qilian Mountains of China. Int J Biometeorol 65, 1849–1858 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-021-02141-w

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