ArticleScientific reports2019
Accelerating upward treeline shift in the Altai Mountains under last-century climate change.
Article in Scientific reports, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 109 citations in OpenAlex.
- Future of high mountain endemic species under climate change: predicting the potential scenarios for Stellaria pulvinata in the Altai Mountains.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The effects of human activity and snow cover on the distribution of mammals and terrestrial birds in the Altai Mountains under climate change.Communications biology · 2026Article
- A century of treeline and forest line data forBiodiversity data journal · 2025Article
- Forecasting Range Shifts in Terrestrial Alpine Insects Under Global Warming.Ecology and evolution · 2025Review
- Genomic insights into local adaptation and vulnerability of Quercus longinux to climate change.BMC plant biology · 2024Article
- Biodiversity hotspot assessment in the Altai Mountains transboundary region based on Mammals and Aves.PloS one · 2024Article
- Forest growth in Europe shows diverging large regional trends.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Fifty years of change in the lower tree line in an arid coniferous forest in the Qilian Mountains, northwestern China.PloS one · 2023Article
- Leaf litter breakdown along an elevational gradient in Australian alpine streams.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Patterns of floristic and functional diversity in two treeline ecotone sites of Kashmir Himalaya.Environmental monitoring and assessment · 2022Article
- Climate change and alpine-adapted insects: modelling environmental envelopes of a grasshopper radiation.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- North American tree migration paced by climate in the West, lagging in the East.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Plant Secondary Metabolites Produced in Response to Abiotic Stresses Has Potential Application in Pharmaceutical Product Development.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- Contrasting Climate Sensitivity ofFrontiers in plant science · 2022Article
- Soil organic carbon storage in a mountain permafrost area of Central Asia (High Altai, Russia).Ambio · 2021Article
- Siberian environmental change: Synthesis of recent studies and opportunities for networking.Ambio · 2021Article
- Article
- Plant ecophysiological processes in spectral profiles: perspective from a deciduous broadleaf forest.Journal of plant research · 2021Review
- Biovera-Epi: A new database on species diversity, community composition and leaf functional traits of vascular epiphytes along gradients of elevation and forest-use intensity in Mexico.Biodiversity data journal · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 5 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Treeline shift and tree growth often respond to climatic changes and it is critical to identify and quantify their dynamics. Some regions are particularly sensitive to climate change and the Altai Mountains, located in Central and East Asia, are showing unequivocal signs. The mean annual temperature in the area has increased by 1.3-1.7 °C in the last century. As this mountain range has ancient and protected forests on alpine slopes, we focus on determining the treeline structure and dynamics. We integrated in situ fine-scale allometric data with analyses from dendrochronological samples, high-resolution 3D drone photos and new satellite images to study the dynamics and underlying causal mechanisms of any treeline movement and growth changes in a remote preserved forest at the Aktru Research Station in the Altai Mountain. We show that temperature increase has a negative effect on mountain tree growth. In contrast, only younger trees grow at higher altitudes and we document a relatively fast upward shift of the treeline. During the last 52 years, treeline moved about 150 m upward and the rate of movement accelerated until recently. Before the 1950s, it never shifted over 2150-2200 m a.s.l. We suggest that a continuous upward expansion of the treeline would be at the expense of meadow and shrub species and radically change this high-mountain ecosystem with its endemic flora. This documented treeline shift represents clear evidence of the increased velocity of climate change during the last century.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.