Abstract ID: 3.10102 | Accepted as Talk | Talk/Oral | TBA | TBA

Latest modelling results point out that about one third of the glacier area will be lost in Stubai and Ötztal Alps during the next five years. With glacier loss, the local hydrological regime, stability of the ground, land use, hazard situation and biodiversity can be expected to change. How rapid the changes will affect, and which feedbacks will become important has neither been observed nor investigated in the past, as the situation has not occurred for at least six to nine millena during the Holocene Optimum and/or the Late Glacial. In contrast to those events, today’s expectations on mitigation and management and the demands are much higher, as migration is not the main tool for coping with various crisis as it was for earlier nomadic societies. At the same time, we lose the ice as habitat, all other habitats might significantly change under pressure of climate change. This raises the question, how those changes could effectively monitored without previous knowledge of what we will want to observe during this and the next decades. Methods as eDNA might provide a good overview at the scales of a basin, but fail to record small scale spatial changes. Therefore, the results might not be useful to investigate trigger points and parameters distinguishing survivor species from the lost ones. Classical in situ surveys are very restricted in the number of plots, and remote sensing techniques are so far not standardized very well. As we need to set up our monitoring right now, transforming from glacier monitoring to biodiversity, we would urgently need a standardized setup for the next decades. This would be also important to ensure at the point measures of natural protection and civil protection for the communities downstreams. When glaciers are gone, the current protection status is gone. A theoretical or empirical foundation would be best for an open discussion if and how transient states of an ecosystem could or should be protected, and on which scientific basis. In conclusion, the case of lost glaciers demonstrate the interconnection of humans and environment, and how important a joint, but diverse perspective will be for managing a sustainable future.