Bøger af Christian Korner

Recent years have seen renewed interest in the fragile alpine biota. The International Year of Mountains in 2002 and numerous international programs and initiatives have contributed to this. Since nearly half of mankind depends on water supplies originating in mountain catchments, the integrity and functional signi?cance of the upland biota is a key to human welfare and will receive even more attention as water becomes an increasingly limited resource. Intact alpine vegetation, as the safeguard of the water towers of the world, is worth being well understood. This new edition of Alpine Plant Life is an update with over 100 new references, new diagrams, revised and extended chapters (particularly 7, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17) and now also offers a geographic index. My thanks go to the many careful readers of the ?rst edition for their most valuable comments, in parti- lar to Vicente I. Deltoro (Valencia) and Johanna Wagner (Innsbruck). Basel, April 2003 Christian Körner Preface to the ?rst edition One of the largest natural biological experiments, perhaps the only one replicated across all latitudes and all climatic regions, is uplift of the la- scape and exposure of organisms to dramatic climatic gradients over a very short distance, otherwise only seen over thousands ofkilometers of poleward traveling. Generations of plant scientists have been fascinated by these natural test areas, and have explored plant and ecosystem responses to alpine life conditions. Alpine Plant Life is an attempt at a synthesis.

The United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED), held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, spawned a multitude of pro- grammes aimed at assessing, managing and conserving the earth's biological diversity. One important issue addressed at the conference was the mountain environment. A specific feature of high mountains is the so-called alpine zone, i. e. the treeless regions at the uppermost reaches. Though covering only a very small proportion of the land surface, the alpine zone contains a rela- tively large number of plants, animals, fungi and microbes which are specifi- cally adapted to cold environments. This zone contributes fundamentally to the planet's biodiversity and provides many resources for mountain dwelling as well as lowland people. However, rapid and largely man-made changes are affecting mountain ecosystems, such as soil erosion, losses of habitat and genetic diversity, and climate change, all of which have to be addressed. As stated in the European Community Biodiversity Strategy, "e;the global scale of biodiversity reduction or losses and the interdependence of different species and ecosystems across national borders demands concerted international action"e;. Managing biodiversity in a rational and sustainable way needs basic knowledge on its qualitative and quantitative aspects at local, regional and global scales. This is particularly true for mountains, which are distributed throughout the world and are indeed hot spots of biodiversity in absolute terms as well as relative to the surrounding lowlands.

The book covers the characteristics of alpine plant life, alpine climate and soils, life under snow, stress tolerance, treeline ecology, plant water, carbon, and nutrient relations, plant growth and productivity, developmental processes, and two largely novel chapters on alpine plant reproduction and global change biology.

Covers the first global conference on mountain biodiversity. This work includes 27 chapters that represent research on the biological riches in the various major mountain ranges of the world, and synthesizes knowledge on mountain biodiversity - from diversity of bacteria, plants and animals to human diversity.