Mountain Ecosystems under Global Change

Mountain areas are important systems for biodiversity and global biogeochemical cycles and deliver a broad range of essential ecosystem services. In many mountain regions, including the Alps, climate change has been taking place at higher rates than the global average with potentially critical impacts on ecosystems, which are characterized by small-scale complexity and high sensitivity. While patterns of the responses of mountain ecosystems to global changes are increasingly emerging, there are significant gaps in the understanding of the underlying processes and their larger-scale implications in a future world.