Project

Discipline

biodiversity; land use; erosion; global change; Caucasus; mountain ecology; datamining; productivity; management; Great Caucasus; mountain biodiversity; indicator species; open access; electronic biodiversity database; georeference; GBIF; GMBA

Lead
Lay summary
Module 1: Slope stability and biodiversity in the Caucasus, a synthesis of available knowledge and recommendations. Grazing and erosion affect biodiversity on steep mountain terrain. In a previous SCOPES research project, species had been identified and ranked which are particularly robust against erosion and thus useful for re-vegetation activities. A keystone species had been discovered (Festuca valesiaca) that excerts slope engineer functions as soon as erosion leads to gully formation and creates erosion edges. Surprisingly, the very same species had been found to play a similar role in the Swiss Central Alps (paper submitted by Caprez et al.; parallel project in Switzerland by Huck et al. in the uppermost Reuss valley). Each of the winner and looser species (a total of c. 50 species) will be now characterized by range limits, centers of abundance in terms of elevation, geology and topography, to explore their wider role in a greater geographic framework (see module 2). These data will help to predict effects of global change and to identify indicator taxa (or groups of taxa) for sustainable rangeland management. The module offers synergies with ongoing research in the Alps (similar works in Innsbruck and Grenoble), following the research agenda of the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment (GMBA) of DIVERSITAS.Module 2: Biodiversity in the Great Caucasus: open access species database for improved biodiversity management and projections of trends under global change. This module proposes an electronic biodiversity archive initiative, aiming at building an electronic database that includes both, archive data (herbarium vouchers) as well as observational data (relevé data) of more than 40 years of field work in steep mountain terrain by the Georgian team (many hundreds of 'relevés', each consisting of exactly geo-referenced species lists). This database will open the possibility to link the Georgian field ecology community with the GBIF (Copenhagen) international biodiversity data portal, in particular to contribute to the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment (GMBA) mountain portal with GBIF (online in 2010). Open access to Great Caucasus data will permit a much larger comparison of typical settings of plant communities in steep mountains worldwide. In addition, the project will distill large scale patterns of species diversity in the Great Caucasus with respect to land use and erosion aspects (see Module 1), climatic and topographic affiliations of certain taxa and elevational trends. A particular task will be identifying the environmental envelope of species that had been found to be key stone species for slope stability.

Direct link to Lay Summary

Last update: 21.02.2013

Active participation

Self-organised

Self-organised

Communication	Title	Media	Place	Year

Number	Title	Start	Funding scheme

The project will provide a synthesis of available knowledge and recommendations on slope stability and biodiversity in the Caucasus, profiting from results of a previous SCOPES project, where we identified species, which are particularly robust against erosion. We will now explore the role of these species in a greater geographic framework, by making available a huge dataset on plant diversity of the Caucasus accumulated by the Prof. G. Nakhutsrishvili and his team over the last 40 years. From the database we will distill large scale patterns of species diversity in the Caucasus with respect to land use and erosion aspects, and use it for projections of trends under global change and improved biodiversity management in the Caucasus. In the end, these long-term biodiversity data will be made internationally available via the GMBA Mountain Portal with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.