A warming climate could affect the stability of alpine grasslands in Asia’s Tibetan Plateau, threatening the ability of farmers and herders to maintain the animals that are key to their existence, and potentially upsetting the ecology of an area in which important regional river systems originate, says a new study by researchers in China and the United States.
A warming climate could affect the stability of alpine grasslands in Asia’s Tibetan Plateau, threatening the ability of farmers and herders to maintain the animals that are key to their existence, and potentially upsetting the ecology of an area in which important regional river systems originate, says a new study by researchers in China and the United States.
Though temperature changes could destabilize the fragile ecosystem of the area, variations in rainfall appear to have no similar effect. The study involved varying two factors likely to change with a warming climate – temperature and rainfall – in test plots over a five-year period. The project is believed to be the first to simultaneously examine the effects of temperature and rainfall changes on ecosystem stability.
“We were concerned about the variability of the total community plant cover over time,” said Lin Jiang, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences. “Significant warming could reduce the stability of the grasslands, which would increase the variability of plant biomass production that could be a significant issue for people living in the region. We believe the effects of climate change could be particularly dramatic in this area.”
Read more at Georgia Institute of Technology
Image: Researchers studied the effects of rising temperatures and varying rainfall on Tibetan Plateau grasslands at this experimental site at the Haibei Alpine Grassland Ecosystem Research Station of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. (Credit: Xian Yang and Qianna Xu)
