Abstracts

Forest Ecosystems

Introduction. Mountains of southern Siberia (Altai, East and West Sayans, Tyva and Transbaikalia) is a region of complex topography, causing a great variety of climatic habitats and biodiversity of plant cover in particular of mountain forests. Our goal is to identify and formalize climate-vegetation relationships as bioclimatic models and apply these models to predict vegetation change under climate perturbation at local level.

Methods. Multiple linear and nonlinear regressions were employed to relate site forests and climatic parameters. Ordinations were employed to relate forest types and biodiversity to site climates. A regional database (DB) “Climate of the southern Siberia’s mountains ” and several local databases “Forests of southern Siberia’s mountains” (one database per a forest province) were created. Local DB fields were topography parameters (elevation, slope and aspect), forest parameters (tree species composition, site quality, stocking, forest type and biodiversity of higher plants) and climatic indices (GDD, base 5oC, precipitation, radiation balance and dryness index) calculated from DB “ Climate of the southern Siberia’s mountains” with respect of site topography. Based on GIS-methods climatic fields of DBs were used to produce climatic layers. All modeling steps were visualized in Idrisi32.

Results. We developed bioclimatic models to predict site forest structure from local climates and topography. Our models are static describing climax forests being in an equilibrium with climate. We reconstructed features of climax forests in West Sayan and Altai anthropogenically transformed when coupling our models to current climate. We predicted forest structure changes over Transbaikalia under expected global warming when coupling our models to climate change scenarios.

Note. Abstracts are published in author's edition

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