Climate change is shifting the spatial distribution of suitable habitat for all species, but the vast majority of mountain plant species is not keeping pace with climatic changes by dispersing fast enough to higher elevations. This means that many rare and threatened mountain plant species will almost certainly go extinct, unless we help them to overcome dispersal limitations by translocating them to sites that are suitable now and in the near future - a practice called “assisted migration”. While currently being explored and implemented in forestry, assisted migration remains controversial in the field of biodiversity and conservation, even though a consensus is emerging that it must become an essential ingredient to help slowing or halting extinctions due to climate change. In Switzerland, policies on assisted migration are only now being considered, and assisted migration is not yet on the “menu” of strategies for ecological restoration and conservation. Our objective is to launch a programme of assisted migration for mountain plants threatened by climate change in Switzerland, specifically aiming to: (1) reach agreement among stakeholders and cantonal authorities on the boundary conditions under which assisted migration can be promoted as a conservation practice; (2) establish essential knowledge and practical experience with ex situ propagation and (3) in situ assisted migration of threatened mountain plant species by setting up field trials at restoration and ecological infrastructure sites; and (4) facilitate knowledge transfer by creating a science-based, practice-oriented, open-access toolbox. In so doing, we hope to forge both a platform and a community of practice for urgently needed exchange of experiences, resources and best practices for assisted migration that will extend beyond the lifetime of the project. We have assembled a consortium of key stakeholders to reach these aims, including scientists skilled in evaluating the social context and ecological underpinnings of assisted migration, representatives of cantonal and federal authorities and national databases responsible for making recommendations and defining policy in this area, experts in high elevation restoration and propagation of rare and threatened species, industry partners from the renewable energy infrastructure sector who can provide restoration sites for in situ trials of assisted migration, and ecological consultancies who will be key for implementing assisted migration in restoration projects in the longer term.

Funded by: Swiss National Science Foundation (National research programme ‘Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services)

Duration: 11/2025 – 10/2029

PIs:  Sabine Rumpf (University of Basel), Jake Alexander (ETH Zurich), Christophe Randin (Jardin Flore-Alpe, Champex-Lac)

How is climate change affecting vegetation at the outposts of plant life?

As part of the Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments GLORIA, we are conducting together with colleagues from the University of Vienna and the Alpine Botanical Garden Champex-Lac a long-term monitoring project in North-East Greenland close to the research station Zackenberg.

In this project we re-survey detailed vegetation information in permanent plots along an elevation gradient in the High Arctic, and relate the observed changes to temperature trends, soil characteristics, the soil microbiome, leaf nutrient status and plant mycorrhizal associations. The field campaign 2021 was funded by the Swiss Polar Institute.

Arctic and high-alpine ecosystems remained comparatively natural so far but are currently disproportionally affected by accelerating climate warming. Terrestrial plant species are therefore shifting their ranges to higher latitudes and elevations to track the conditions they are adapted to. It remains, however, unknown whether the velocity of these species-specific range shifts is increasing accordingly or whether they are increasingly lagging behind climatic trends. In this project, funded by the Swiss Polar Institute, we will integrate the high Arctic into a Europe-wide endeavour to address this knowledge gap together with colleagues from the University of Bergen, the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research, and the University Centre in Svalbard. In 2023, we chartered a sailing boat to re-survey vegetation plots and transects on the high-Arctic archipelago of Svalbard that were first recorded during the years 1924-1960 and re-surveyed in 2009.

To complement the project “Filling the high-Arctic gap in Europe-wide plant re-distributions during the Anthropocene”, we re-surveyed historical vegetation plots and transects around Longyearbyen in Svalbard with a similar goal in mind – to determine whether species-specific responses in range shifts are non-linear. This project was funded by the Arctic Field Grant dedicated to Sophie Weides and is conducted in cooperation with the University Center in Svalbard, the University of Bergen and the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research.