Assessing climate change effects on mountain ecosystems using integrated models: a case study
Fagre DB, Running SW, Keane RE, Peterson DL. Assessing climate change effects on mountain ecosystems using integrated models: a case study
Mountain systems are characterized by strong environmental gradients, rugged topography and extreme spatial heterogeneity in community structure and composition. Consequently, mountainous areas have relatively high rates of endemism and biodiversity and function as species refugia in many areas of the world. Mountains have long been recognized as critical entities in regional climatic and hydrological dynamics but their importance in terrestrial carbon flux has been recently underscored as well. Mountain ecosystems, therefore, are globally important as well as unusually complex. These ecosystems challenge our ability to understand their dynamics and predict their response to climatic variability and global-scale environmental change.
- Type
- Unpublished Report
- Authors
- Fagre, Daniel; Running, Steven; Keane, Robert; Peterson, David
- Units
- GLAC
- Keywords
- Biodiversity, Climate, Hydrology, Modeling, Precipitation, Vegetation, Watershed