Microclim is an ERC-AdG project which addresses the role of microclimatic variation for the survival of alpine plants in a warming climate.
Alpine plants are adapted to cold temperatures and are hence considered sensitive to climate change. Standard modelling approaches, which use changes in air temperatures as driving force, predict that these plants would need to shift their current distributions up by hundreds of meters in order to keep the climatic conditions they live in constant. Given that many mountains are conic in shape, and all are limited in altitude, such upslope shifts imply massive habitat loss or even complete extinctions from summits that are too low.
However, the alpine terrain is characterized by pronounced ruggedness. As a consequence, near-surface temperature, which is more relevant for low-stature alpine plants than air temperature, can vary by several degrees over distances of only a few meters. It has been hypothesized that this pronounced microclimatic variation might buffer the alpine flora against climate warming because it guarantees that a certain number of ‘cold spots’ will stay available in each alpine landscape in a warming world. Standard modelling approaches might hence deliver overly pessimistic forecasts of the future fate of alpine floras.
In Microclim, we want to evaluate the empirical evidence for such microclimatic buffering by linking so far separated research strands of monitoring and predictive modelling of alpine plant distribution. In particular, we will, first, compare predictions of standard modelling approaches with the results of 25 years of Europe-wide monitoring of mountaintop floras (
https://www.gloria.ac.at(öffnet in neuem Fenster)) and analyse the role of spatial scale for possible mismatches between models and observations of change. Second, we will develop a novel modelling framework that simulates the simultaneous range dynamics of many interacting plant species. We will parameterise this model by means of experiments and observational data and evaluate it against monitoring data on an exemplary mountain in the Austrian Alps (Mt. Schrankogel). We will then apply the model to simulate the dynamics of the flora of this mountain over the 21st century at a very fine spatial resolution. We will finally generalize the results achieved in these dynamic simulations to all summits included in the European mountaintop monitoring network to evaluate the proposed rescue effect of microclimatic variation.
