Climate-Change Impacts on the Southernmost Mediterranean Arctic-Alpine Plant Populations

Konstantinos Kougioumoutzis, Ioannis P. Kokkoris, Arne Strid, Thomas Raus and Panayotis Dimopoulos
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Konstantinos Kougioumoutzis: Laboratory of Botany, Department of Biology, University of Patras, 26504 Patras, Greece
Ioannis P. Kokkoris: Laboratory of Botany, Department of Biology, University of Patras, 26504 Patras, Greece
Arne Strid: Bakkevej 6, DK-5853 Ørbæk, Denmark
Thomas Raus: Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum Berlin-Dahlem, Freie Universität Berlin, 14195 Berlin, Germany
Panayotis Dimopoulos: Laboratory of Botany, Department of Biology, University of Patras, 26504 Patras, Greece

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 24, 1-23

Abstract: Human-induced climate- and land-use change have been affecting biogeographical and biodiversity patterns for the past two centuries all over the globe, resulting in increased extinction and biotic homogenization rates. High mountain ecosystems are more sensitive to these changes, which have led to physiological and phenological shifts, as well as to ecosystem processes’ deformation. Glacial relicts, such as arctic-alpine taxa, are sensitive indicators of the effects of global warming and their rear-edge populations could include warm-adapted genotypes that might prove—conservation-wise—useful in an era of unprecedented climate regimes. Despite the ongoing thermophilization in European and Mediterranean summits, it still remains unknown how past and future climate-change might affect the distributional patterns of the glacial relict, arctic-alpine taxa occurring in Greece, their European southernmost distributional limit. Using species distribution models, we investigated the impacts of past and future climate changes on the arctic-alpine taxa occurring in Greece and identified the areas comprising arctic-alpine biodiversity hotspots in Greece. Most of these species will be faced with severe range reductions in the near future, despite their innate resilience to a multitude of threats, while the species richness hotspots will experience both altitudinal and latitudinal shifts. Being long-lived perennials means that there might be an extinction-debt present in these taxa, and a prolonged stability phase could be masking the deleterious effects of climate change on them. Several ex situ conservation measures (e.g., seed collection, population augmentation) should be taken to preserve the southernmost populations of these rare arctic-alpine taxa and a better understanding of their population genetics is urgently needed.

Keywords: biodiversity conservation; extinction risk; GIS analysis; Greece; Mediterranean flora; species distribution modelling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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