Mountain elevational stratifications

Short description

In the early 19th century, Alexander von Humboldt first stratified mountains by defining altitudinal zones based on their vegetation, climate, soils, and human uses. By then, Humboldt casted notions such as “tierra caliente” when talking about the lowlands and “tierra nevada” when talking about the “nival zone”. Others since then have described patterns in species and ecosystems along vertical gradients according to so-called climate or life zones and altitudinal, vegetation, thermal, or bioclimatic belts, thereby following the broad dichotomy between a biodiversity and a climate perspective to ecological zonation. More holistic descriptions, in turn, have used cultural landmarks, land use types, or landscape features as referential. Together with the fact that not all belts occur in all mountains and that each belt can have very different elevations and vertical ranges in different mountain systems (and even mountain flanks), this diversity of stratification systems represents a challenge for standardized and comparative reporting, assessment, and analysis of mountain species and ecosystems worldwide. This challenge is further exacerbated by the ongoing evolution of ecological zones under climate change. Finding a common set of zones that appear everywhere on Earth is impossible. Yet, devising an approach to consistently associate mountain species and ecosystems along their vertical distribution to ecological zones is a prerequisite to the global assessment of mountain biodiversity recently initiated by the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment network (GMBA) and that aims at systematically describing both the state of research and current trends in mountain biodiversity. Our objective is to devise such an approach.

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