In a study published in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, a team led by Prof. WANG Yufei from the Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with a collaborator from Austria, revealed a complex response of plant diversity to climate warming during the past 14,000 years in the Hengduan Mountains of southwestern China.

The researchers conducted interdisciplinary analyses including pollen, grain size, and loss-on-ignition of a 170 cm-deep soil section from the southern slope (elevation: 3,000 m above sea level) of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, within the southeastern Hengduan Mountains, one of the world's foremost biodiversity hotspots.

The researchers found that three natural warming events, i.e. the Bølling-Allerød warm period, the end of the Younger Dryas event, and the Holocene Climatic Optimum, did not lead to a linear increase in plant diversity, and that the fluctuations of diversity indices, including Simpson, Shannon-Weiner, rarefied richness and evenness, were not completely synchronous.

Moreover, the researchers revealed that climate warming affected the composition of taxa in the communities and further modified the vegetation structure.

This work offers a basis for biodiversity conservation and sustainable development in the montane regions of southwestern China under future warming scenarios, and it serves as a reference for examining deep-time plant diversity responses to climate warming in similar montane ecosystems worldwide.