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Study: How Climate Change Threatens Mountaintops (and Clean Water)
https://www.uvm.edu/~uvmpr/?Page=news&storyID=23947&category=uvmhome[font face=Serif][font size=5]Study: How Climate Change Threatens Mountaintops (and Clean Water)[/font]
[font size=4]Two UVM scientists help lead global research published in Nature[/font]
01-26-2017
By Joshua E. Brown
[font size=3]Mountains are far more than rocks. They also confer various natural benefits—for example, about half of the world’s drinking water filters through their high-elevation forests, plants, and soils.
Now, a new, first-of-its kind study, in the journal Nature, shows how these mountain ecosystems around the globe may be threatened by climate change.
Rising temperatures over the next decades appear likely to “decouple” key nutrient cycles in mountain soils and plants, an international team of sixteen scientists reports. Their study suggests that this is expected to disrupt the function of mountaintop ecosystems, as plant communities above and at treeline are thrown into turmoil faster than trees can migrate uphill in a warmer world.
…
The predictions are worrisome. For example, “we see that at lower elevations the nitrogen cycle speeds up with warming,” says University of Vermont ecologist Aimée Classen, a co-author on the new study. So the scientists expect that global warming will improve the nitrogen nutrition available to mountain plants. However, decreasing elevation did not increase the availability of phosphorus, another key nutrient for plants. In other words, as mountaintops warm, “you're like to get this disconnect—a decoupling—between the balance of those two nutrient cycles that are needed to build plant materials,” Classen says. Over decades and centuries, this lost balance between nitrogen and phosphorus could “slow productivity,” of mountaintop ecosystems, she says, threatening their health and the downslope benefits they provide to other plants, animals and people.
…[/font][/font]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature21027
[font size=4]Two UVM scientists help lead global research published in Nature[/font]
01-26-2017
By Joshua E. Brown
[font size=3]Mountains are far more than rocks. They also confer various natural benefits—for example, about half of the world’s drinking water filters through their high-elevation forests, plants, and soils.
Now, a new, first-of-its kind study, in the journal Nature, shows how these mountain ecosystems around the globe may be threatened by climate change.
Rising temperatures over the next decades appear likely to “decouple” key nutrient cycles in mountain soils and plants, an international team of sixteen scientists reports. Their study suggests that this is expected to disrupt the function of mountaintop ecosystems, as plant communities above and at treeline are thrown into turmoil faster than trees can migrate uphill in a warmer world.
…
The predictions are worrisome. For example, “we see that at lower elevations the nitrogen cycle speeds up with warming,” says University of Vermont ecologist Aimée Classen, a co-author on the new study. So the scientists expect that global warming will improve the nitrogen nutrition available to mountain plants. However, decreasing elevation did not increase the availability of phosphorus, another key nutrient for plants. In other words, as mountaintops warm, “you're like to get this disconnect—a decoupling—between the balance of those two nutrient cycles that are needed to build plant materials,” Classen says. Over decades and centuries, this lost balance between nitrogen and phosphorus could “slow productivity,” of mountaintop ecosystems, she says, threatening their health and the downslope benefits they provide to other plants, animals and people.
…[/font][/font]
