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Article
Linking leaf elemental traits to biomass across forest biomes in the Himalayas
Plants require a number of essential elements in different proportions for ensuring their growth and development. The elemental concentrations in leaves reflect the functions and adaptations of plants under sp...
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Article
Open AccessNature-based Solutions can help restore degraded grasslands and increase carbon sequestration in the Tibetan Plateau
The Tibetan grassland ecosystems possess significant carbon sink potential and have room for improved carbon sequestration processes. There is a need to uncover more ambitious and coherent solutions (e.g., Nat...
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Article
Shifts of forest resilience after seismic disturbances in tectonically active regions
Forests in tectonically active regions are disturbed by earthquakes. Besides direct injuries to trees, earthquakes also induce stand-wide changes in hydrological conditions, whose effects on long-term forest g...
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Chapter
Impact of Climate Change on Plants in the Nepal Himalayas
Growing evidence shows that growth patterns, distribution range shifts, and modifications of adaptation strategies of plants fingerprint the impacts of climate change. Plants growing in the Himalayan mountains...
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Article
Open AccessGlobal tree growth resilience to cold extremes following the Tambora volcanic eruption
Although the global climate is warming, external forcing driven by explosive volcanic eruptions may still cause abrupt cooling. The 1809 and 1815 Tambora eruptions caused lasting cold extremes worldwide, provi...
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Article
Contrasting treeline dynamics of pine and birch in response to climate warming in the Karakoram
Pine benefited from a warming climate with increasing recruitment and upslope shifts of alpine treeline but birch treelines were mostly static highlighting the influence of other confounding, local factors.
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Article
Intensity, frequency and rate of insect herbivory for an alpine Rhododendron shrub: elevational patterns and leaf-age effects
Uncertainty still exists on the directions and intensity of changes in leaf herbivory under scenarios of global warming. We, therefore, conducted an investigation on insect herbivory along an elevational gradi...
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Article
Increased drought effects on the phenology of autumn leaf senescence
Global warming delays the autumn date of foliar senescence (DFS) in recent decades, with positive implications for growing season length and therefore global carbon storage. However, warming-associated drought...
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Article
Enhanced habitat loss of the Himalayan endemic flora driven by warming-forced upslope tree expansion
High-elevation trees cannot always reach the thermal treeline, the potential upper range limit set by growing-season temperature. But delineation of the realized upper range limit of trees and quantification o...
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Article
An earlier start of the thermal growing season enhances tree growth in cold humid areas but not in dry areas
Climatic warming alters the onset, duration and cessation of the vegetative season. While previous studies have shown a tight link between thermal conditions and leaf phenology, less is known about the impacts...
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Article
Threshold responses of juniper tree growth and regeneration to climate warming and drought stress at alpine treeline
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Article
Unexpected climate variability inferred from a 380-year tree-ring earlywood oxygen isotope record in the Karakoram, Northern Pakistan
To provide a long-term context for understanding the “Karakoram Anomaly” in recent glacier studies, we originally aimed to develop an annually resolved multi-century winter–spring precipitation record using tr...
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Article
Negative growth responses to temperature of sympatric species converge under warming conditions on the southeastern Tibetan Plateau
Warming-induced drought stress leads to convergent and negative growth responses to temperature between sympatric tree species, implying an increasing interspecific competition for soil moisture.
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Article
A tree-ring–based summer (June–July) minimum temperature reconstruction for the western Kunlun Mountains since AD 1681
Knowledge of past climatic variability for the Tibetan Plateau (TP), especially the northwestern part of it, is still limited due to the lack of long-term meteorological records. Within this study, we develope...
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Article
A tree ring-based winter temperature reconstruction for the southeastern Tibetan Plateau since 1340 CE
Climatic change is exhibiting significant effects on the ecosystem of the Tibetan Plateau (TP), a climate-sensitive area. In particularly, winter frost, freezing events and snow avalanche frequently causing se...
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Article
New perspectives on sub-seasonal xylem anatomical responses to climatic variability
Quantitative wood anatomy represents a tool to investigate paleoclimatic signals on a seasonal to sub-seasonal basis.
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Article
Fire facilitates warming-induced upward shifts of alpine treelines by altering interspecific interactions
Moderate-severity fire disturbances can accelerate upslope shifts of alpine treelines by reducing interspecific interactions, providing additional evidence for the species interaction mechanism in controlling ...
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Article
Frost controls spring phenology of juvenile Smith fir along elevational gradients on the southeastern Tibetan Plateau
Impacts of climatic means on spring phenology are well documented, whereas the role of climatic variance, such as occurrence of spring frosts, has long been neglected. A large elevational gradient of forests o...
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Article
Sampling strategy and climatic implication of tree-ring cellulose oxygen isotopes of Hippophae tibetana and Abies georgei on the southeastern Tibetan Plateau
The tree-ring cellulose oxygen isotopes (δ18O) for four trees of Hippophae tibetana and four trees of Abies georgei growing in different locations around the terminal moraine in **ncuo from 1951 to 2010 were meas...
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Article
Threshold-dependent and non-linear associations between temperature and tree growth at and below the alpine treeline