Dear MIREN friends and colleagues,
Albeit being late, we would like to wish you all a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2022. The last few years have presented challenges for us, our families, and our research. Despite these challenges we have continued research and synthesis on plant diversity in mountain ecosystems. All our contributions and collaborations have made MIREN’s success possible. We have a lot happening and a lot to look forward to.
In 2021, a large BiodivERsA project called RangeX was started, led by Jake Alexander at ETH, and includes collaborators in Europe, South Africa and South America, and is supported by many more MIREN regions across all continents (https://www.mountaininvasions.org/rangex). There are both doctoral and post-doctoral researchers working on range expanding species and temporal patterns of plant diversity in mountains. MIREN member Jonas Lembrechts (Antwerp) led the publishing of the first global soil temperature database, with many MIREN sites contributing soil temperature data from across the elevation gradient (https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16060). A peer reviewed manuscript describing the MIREN road survey protocol has been accepted in Ecology & Evolution and another manuscript by Evelin Iseli (ETH) assesses temporal changes in non-native species distributions and is under review. We also published all the geo-located data of plant species that we collected and collated in the MIREN road surveys between 2007 and 2015 (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5529072). We will continue to update the data as new publications come out. We look forward to more great collaboration in 2022. In the Southern Hemisphere, MIREN members have already started resampling plots of the MIREN road survey established in 2007.With the publication of the MIREN road survey protocol we look forward to other regions joining our MIREN team of collaborators and sampling plant diversity along elevation gradients in their regions. If you are interested, please reach out to via the website (www.mountaininvasions.org).
We also hope that on-site conferences and travel will be possible again, and we would like to draw your attention to a MIREN-organized session at the International Mountain Conference in Innsbruck/Austria in September 2022 (https://www.imc2022.info/portfolio/id45-native-and-non-native-species-range-expansions-in-mountains/). Abstract submission just opened.
All the best to you and your families.
Sincerely,
Tim Seipel and Sylvia Haider (MIREN co-chairs)
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