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Descrizione
Accelerated glacier retreat trends, mainly driven by human-induced climate change, are causing important changes in mountain landscapes. In the European Alps, over a century of glacier retreat has left new vast areas open for biotic colonization (mainly driven by plants and microbes).
Increasing time since deglaciation usually involves an increase in structural diversity and provides fundamental ecosystem services, including mountain slope stabilization, control of surface runoff and soil erosion.
Increasing in plant diversity, facilitating animal colonization, also involves an increase in ecological diversity leading to the establishment of complex biotic communities and the development of new ecosystems.
In order to provide new data on the balance between gross primary production and ecosystem respiration, and to understand if these systems indeed act as either sinks or sources of greenhouse gases, field campaigns aimed to collect data on carbon dioxide fluxes has been carried on in the summer seasons in five study areas distributed across the European Alps (273 sampled points for ER and GPP). Sampled points were collected from a total of 24 sites representing different positions (dated lines) reached by these five glaciers in the recent past.
An R routine, accompanied by metadata, was developed to analyse CO2 fluxes from glacier forelands, summarizing data, calculating GPP and visualizing trends in ER and NEE from the investigated glacier forelands. Following Open Science principles, data and the R code have been made accessible in the CZ VRE, allowing users to analyse trends, explore relationships and to adapt the code for their own datasets.
By combining data on deglaciation time, aboveground productivity, green fractional cover, plant diversity and climate from five Alpine glacier forelands, we aim at identifying the main drivers and trends of primary production and respiration along the chronosequence at local and regional scales.
