Eco News 24# – declining mountain meadows

November 4th, 2012

Hello Greenzoners, I hope you are having good day in which we greet you with new Eco News. 😉

mountain meadow

Mountain meadows are slowly declining and being destroyed in the Northern Pacific areas. Once huge tracts of green grass and  rare, wild flowers, now they are being dominated by spreading trees and other thick and territorialy invasive plant species. The reason behind this is progressing global warming and rising temperature – because there’s less snowcaps, trees have more time and possibilities to grow and spread, taking the space that belongs to the meadows. It disturbs the important biodiversity in the ecosystem and decreases the quality of soil under the meadow, as well as beneath the forest. This process was already reported in 1970, but the biggest effect was to be noticed up to now.

Some scientists say that meadows may just move more towards mountains, like backing from the invading forests. But it would imply meadows being very steep, which also is bad for development of certain plants.

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