Infra-red thermometry in alpine terrain

Rough alpine terrain offers climatic conditions (niches) to plants poorly represented by conventional climate station data. Here we used high resolution infra-red thermometry and small data loggers to assess the spatial and temporal variation of plant-surface and ground-temperature as well as snow melt patterns for 889 test plots, distributed across three alpine slopes. These environmental data were than correlated with Landolt indicator values for temperature preferences of different vegetation units.
The observed micro-habitat variation in seasonal mean soil temperature (ΔT=7.2 K), surface temperature (ΔT=10.5 K) and season length (>32 days) strongly correlated with the mean indicator values for temperature of plant communities. Cold demanding plant species grew in significantly colder micro-habitats than plants with higher indicator values found on the same slope.
Our results demonstrate that the topography induced mosaics of micro-climatic conditions in an alpine landscape are associated with plant species distribution. Local thermal contrasts significantly exceed IPCC warming projections for the next hundred years, a warning against over simplistic applications of average warming scenarios in models of the fate of alpine biota. Due to their rich topography and micro-habitat diversity, alpine landscapes are likely to be safer places in a warming world for most species than lowland terrain.