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Introduction
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Position
- Cartography and inventory of snowbeds in the National Park of Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici
June 2002 - present
Publications
Publications (33)
Aims
Chionophilous vegetation (i.e. snowbed vegetation and chionophilous grasslands) hosts relict arctic–alpine species, among which snowbed specialists, that find their southernmost limit in the Iberian Peninsula, where they are especially threatened by climate change. Our aims were to identify the main Iberian chionophilous vegetation groups, and...
The impact of ongoing climate change on plant communities varies according to vegetation type and location across the globe. Snowbed flora count among the most sensitive vegetation due to their dependence on long-lasting snow patches. This is especially the case toward their rear distribution edge, where warming has already induced a marked decreas...
Here we studied the adaptation of plant communities to environment in the alpine belt of the Catalan Pyrenees through comparative analysis of plant traits. The starting point consisted of about 800 phytocoenological relevés from the Banc de Dades de Biodiversitat de Catalunya, which corresponded to 47 communities (associations and subassociations)...
Species occurrence is subjected to the particular ecological constraints of each site where species that can become dominant exert strong influence on community structure and functioning. Given the harsh environmental conditions in alpine areas and the low number of woody species able to support them, we wanted to study the effect of the main abiot...
This map is the result of the fusion in a single cartographic document of the whole series of the Vegetation Map of Catalonia at a scale 1: 50,000 (MVC50), elaborated for more than three decades under the coordination of the Group of Geobotany and Vegetation Cartography of the University of Barcelona (GEOVEG). This fusion project has involved the u...
Presentation and update of PHYLOPYR project. More info:
https://youtu.be/GUU3kvRFK_w
EuropaBON EBV workflow templates
The information provided here represents the EBV workflow templates collected during the EuropaBON online workshop on Essential Biodiversity
Variable (EBV) workflows from 22–24 February 2023. The templates were designed to capture comprehensive descriptions about the three
workflow components (data collection and s...
ANTECEDENTES
En los últimos años la ciencia ciudadana se ha consolidado como una de las principales fuentes de datos sobre biodiversidad en general y más particularmente en botánica. Dicha información, sin
embargo, resulta muy heterogénea tanto en aspectos formales como de calidad de datos. Nuestro trabajo plantea un primer análisis de la aportaci...
The functional differences between species are key to face the heterogeneity of environments at distinct space scales. More singular habitats-fens, rocky areas-host particular species through plant traits coupled with these ecosystems, whereas more balanced environments give way to co-occurrence of distinct plant strategies at the plant community l...
Abstract: In the next decades, alpine mountains are expected to experience higher
temperatures, reduced snowpack, and earlier snowmelt due to global warming.
This will have severe consequences on plant species and communities,
especially those that grow in snowbed habitats and rely on a deep, long-lasting
snowpack such as Salix herbacea, a snowbed...
Abstract: In alpine areas, snow duration is the most limiting factor for plant development. Within the current context of climate change, models point to an increase of mean temperatures and a reduction of precipitation in the Pyrenees, which may result in a reduction of snowpack duration. In snowbeds, i.e. those habitats where snow lasts until mid...
This document collects unpublished vegetation inventories carried out in the Principality of Andorra within the framework of various mapping, inventory and evaluation projects of flora and vegetation. They are presented in text form, and also in a cartographic file containing the location of the inventories and an associated attribute table (availa...
Alpine landscapes include strong abiotic gradients, which promote the coexistence along short distances of varying plant communities. Here, we analyse the vegetation of the alpine belt of the Catalan and Andorran Pyrenees through functional plant traits, to better understand plant diversity as coupled with the varying alpine landscapes. For this pu...
Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research sp...
Snowbeds are one of the high mountain habitats most threatened by climate change, since they depend on a long snowpack. In 2003-2007 we established seven permanent plots in acidic snowbeds around the national park, and we sampled them in that period and ten years later. In ten years, we found that snowbed specialists showed a tendency to reduce the...
The alpine vegetation is frequently characterized as landscape mosaics where contrasting plant
communities in terms of species composition and functional structure are set responding to abrupt changes through
rough physiography. In this paper, we analyse the vegetation of the alpine belt of the Catalan and Andorran
Pyrenees combining its phytosocio...
The Pyrenean landscape has experienced deep modifications during the last millennia even at high elevations, driven by climatic changes and anthropogenic activities. The current global change, however, forces vegetation responses more than before. The most apparent ongoing vegetation shifts respond mostly to changes in land use through shifts in th...
We show some preliminary results of the snowbed monitoring in the Pyrenees between years 2013 and 2017, related to the current INTERREG project FloraPyr.
Here, we summarize the results of a study focused on the knowledge of the high mountain shrubs and their encroaching role in the National Park. We analyzed the ecological distribution and the functional traits of eight species behaving as more or less invasive, and four species locally rare and not invasive. In the most relevant species, we studied...
Through the digital cartography of habitats of Catalonia we studied the coexistence relations between alpine shrublands and grasslands, and we assessed the impacts at ecosystem level of shrub encroachment into those grasslands showing higher coexistence with shrub communities.
In mid-latitude mountains, snowbeds often consist of small, scattered alpine belt units that host many plants of high biogeographic interest. Because most snowbed species are weak competitors, it is important to study the dissemination and persistence of their seeds to better understand their population dynamics. This study analyzed the snowbed flo...
Monitoring a vegetation transect in one snowbed of the National Park reveals small changes in the species distribution after nine years. The set of plant communities remained the same, but we observed some shifts in the boundaries among them. The snowbed specialist species showed a trend to reduce their space occupancy, moving towards the central p...
Is the Pyrenean flora well known? The western Catalan Pyrenees are still surprising.
Although the flora of the Catalan Pyrenees is rather complete at regional scale, there is great heterogeneity in the knowledge at the local scale. Field work during the last years has yield interesting novelties, in relation with the great environmental diversity...
Thermal gradient and vegetation shifts in Pyrenean snowbeds.
Given the sensitivity of alpine communities to global warming, we set a long-term monitoring project on the vegetation and the temperature regime of Pyrenean snowbeds. We studied a set of contiguous vegetal communities under different snowcover, in two localities situated in Andorra (Creu...
There have been established 19 permanent plots in the National Park in order to study the chionophilous vegetation and to identifty the borders between communities, and also to monitoring the climate change.
Depending on the substrate and the innivation gradient different vegetal communities may be found. On siliceous substrata the borders between...
This paper is aimed to the comparative analysis of the functional structure in the dominant communities of the Alpine belt. With respect to the 10 commonest associations, we obtained structure data of all the published relevés and yielded 38 representative field samples. From these samples, we have evaluated above-ground phytomass patterns and part...