Global warming affects European mountain ranges

The high mountain ecosystem of the European contintent has started to change during the last decades due to climatic change, recent studies say. The great mountain ranges of the world possess very special characteristics: They develop in areas with climatic conditions that are different than those of the surrounding areas, principally, greater precipitations (snow), greater solar radiation, greater thermal oscillations between day and night, and stronger winds. The high mountain environment is very hostile for the development of life. Only some plant and animal species that are adapted to these conditions in a major way are capable of surviving. Most of these species populated much wider areas during the last glacial period and slowly withdrew toward the mountains as the temperature of the planet increased. For this reason, the high mountain ecoysystems could be the most affected by global warming. If the temperature increased notably, the plants and animals that populate the mountains would virtually have nowhere to go, nowhere to “keep going up,” which could cause the extinction of a good percentage of them. The Montseny is a small mountainous massif located to the northeast of Barcelona that constitutes the area of transition between the warmer and dryer atmosphere of the Mediterranean and the colder and more human (Atlantic) of the north of Spain and the west of Europe. According to this research, from 1945, the altitudinal limit of the plant species of the representative Atlantic areas of this mountain range had increased by several dozens of meters (70 in the case of the Haya), while others had disappeared. Last week a team of Austrian scientists published the results of a study that took place in several areas of the Dolomite Alps (Italy) and arrived at the same conclusion. In only five years, the richness of the species has increased in more in elevated areas than in the inferior sub-levels or in the areas bordering the tree line, an even lower level. The increase of the number of species found in the higher areas is due to the apparition of species that are more characteristic of the lower levels (species belonging to the higher areas have only arrived to the highest peak). In the tree line areas, while the number of species hasn’t increased, the abundance of trees and bushes has.