Part of the worldwide biodiversity program DIVERSITAS, the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment (GMBA) assesses the biological richness of high-elevation biota. GMBA s focus includes the uppermost forest regions or their substitute rangeland vegetation, the treeline ecotone, and the alpine and nival belts. Providing more than description, the GMBA explains the causes of biological richness and how diversity changes over time. Because biodiversity changes often result from human land use, part of the GMBA agenda is the assessment of land use impacts. These assessments are critical in...

Recent years have seen renewed interest in the fragile alpine biota. The International Year of Mountains in 2002 and numerous international programs and initiatives have contributed to this. Since nearly half of mankind depends on water supplies originating in mountain catchments, the integrity and functional signi?cance of the upland biota is a key to human welfare and will receive even more attention as water becomes an increasingly limited resource. Intact alpine vegetation, as the safeguard of the water towers of the world, is worth being well understood. This new edition of Alpine Plant...

The United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED), held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, spawned a multitude of pro- grammes aimed at assessing, managing and conserving the earth's biological diversity. One important issue addressed at the conference was the mountain environment. A specific feature of high mountains is the so-called alpine zone, i. e. the treeless regions at the uppermost reaches. Though covering only a very small proportion of the land surface, the alpine zone contains a rela- tively large number of plants, animals, fungi and microbes which are specifi-...