The five glaciers in Bavaria which today cover a total area of less than one square kilometer were frequently monitored by geodetic methods from the mid of the 20th century. In this paper, the record is extended by new surveys in 1999 and 2006. The glaciers show a prolonged surface lowering, which is intensified compared to the 1980s and reaches maximum rates from 1999-2006. Moreover, the ice thickness of four glaciers was determined in 2006 and 2007 by geophysical field techniques and allows the calculation of ice volumes.

The intensity of precipitation events is expected to increase in the future. The rate of increase depends on the strength or rarity of the events; very strong and rare events tend to follow the Clausius-Clapeyron relation, whereas weaker events or precipitation averages do not. An often overlooked aspect is seasonal occurrence of such events, which might change in the future.

Worldwide glacier retreat and associated future runoff changes raise major concerns over the sustainability of global water resources, but global-scale assessments of glacier decline and the resulting hydrological consequences are scarce. Here we compute global glacier runoff changes for 56 large-scale glacierized drainage basins to 2100 and analyse the glacial impact on streamflow.

Many forest ecosystems have experienced recent declines in productivity; however, in some alpine regions, tree growth and forest expansion are increasing at marked rates. Dendrochronological analyses at the upper limit of alpine forests in the Tibetan Plateau show a steady increase in tree growth since the early 1900s, which intensified during the 1930s and 1960s, and have reached unprecedented levels since 1760.

Mountain regions and the important ecosystem services they provide are considered to be very vulnerable to the current warming, and recent studies suggest that high-mountain environments experience more rapid changes in temperature than environments at lower elevations. Here we analysed weather records for the period 1975–2010 from the Eastern Italian Alps that show that warming occurred both at high and low elevations, but it was less pronounced at high elevations.

Climate change is seriously affecting the cryosphere, in terms, for example of permafrost thaw, alteration of rain/snow ratio, glacier shrinkage. There is concern about the increasing number of rockfalls at high elevation in the last decades. Nevertheless, the impact of climate variables on slope instability at high elevation has not been fully explored yet. In this paper, we investigate 41 rockfalls occurred at high elevation in the Italian Alps between 1997 and 2013 in the absence of an evident trigger.

Three people were killed when a severe rainstorm in the Italian Alps caused a landslide that swept down a mountain and across roads and parking lots, authorities said on Wednesday.

Bumblebees represent an active pollinator group in mountain regions and assure the pollination of many different plant species from low to high elevations. Plant-pollinator interactions are mediated by functional traits. Shift in bumblebee functional structure under climate change may impact plant-pollinator interactions in mountains. Here, the researchers estimated bumblebee upward shift in elevation, community turnover, and change in functional structure under climate change.

Using information on current species distributions and dispersal traits, this study forecasts climate-driven range dynamics of plant species across the European Alps. Simulations predict moderate range contractions over the twenty-first century; however, more severe effects of climate warming on mountain plant diversity are expected in the longer term.

This study addresses the extrapolation of in-situ glacier mass balance measurements to the mountain-range scale and aims at deriving time series of area-averaged mass balance and ice volume change for all glaciers in the European Alps for the period 1900–2100. Long-term mass balance series for 50 Swiss glaciers based on a combination of field data and modelling, and WGMS data for glaciers in Austria, France and Italy are used. A complete glacier inventory is available for the year 2003.

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