Researchers have disclosed that alpine plant species tend to move to higher elevation and latitude areas.
A research team from Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences cooperated with overseas institutes in conducting an analysis of 17 alpine plants at altitudes from 2,000 to 5,600 meters in the Himalayas and the Hengduan Mountains, based on analysis of historical specimen records and species distribution modeling.
The researchers predicted that the distributions of the species will shift upward in elevation and northward in latitude with global climate change. The species will also expand the size of their range.
Alpine species are sensitive to climate change, according to their study published in the journals Plant Diversity and Ecology and Evolution. The researchers estimated that the species would face extinction if global temperatures continued to rise.
Researchers from Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) and Australia conducted 20 years of extensive sampling, collecting and identifying over 100,000 individual moths across elevational and latitudinal gradients. They investigated broad-scale patterns of vertical stratification of moths collected from extensive cross-continental fieldwork in a variety of forest types (tropical and subtropical rainforest in eastern Australia; tropical, subtropical and subalpine forest in Yunnan Province, China; and tropical rainforest in Panama, Vietnam, Brunei and Papua New Guinea), climates, elevations, latitudes and areas with differing biogeographical history. They investigated the generality of vertical stratification of night-flying forest Lepidoptera by using all of subsets of the canopy and understorey data sets from across continents, forest types and climates.
Researchers from the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research and the University of Bristol, along with their collaborators, reported that an extensive Tibetan Plateau exceeding 4000 m above sea level (a.s.l.) existed in middle Eocene.
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