PI: Eryuan Liang, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Period：2017-2019
Funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China

Forest ecosystem functions support the provision of ecosystem services for human wellbeing. Global climatic change has showed significant effects on forest ecosystem. However, a prediction of climatic effects still remained a large uncertainty. Elevational gradients at low latitudes can substitute for time series and provide platforms to investigate variations in structure and function of different ecosystem within a short distance. The eastern Himalayas is situated in a transition area between subtropical and temperate mountains, hosting the longest altitudinal gradient in the earth and nature forest belts from tropical forest to alpine treeline and alpine shrubs with increasing altitudes. The elevational forest belts in the Kangchenjunga Landscape, one of the transboundary landscapes in the eastern Himalayas surounded by China, Nepal, Bhutan and India, provide the most idea ‘natural experimental site’ to explore variations in forest structure and functions of different forest ecosystem with a comparable research protocol.The objectives of this project are to 1) establish permanent forest plots along the elevational gradients in the Kangchenjunga Landscape; 2) retrieve variations of forest structure and growths in the past 100 years based dendroecological methods; 3) predict the response of forest ecosystem to climate change based on a Space-For-Time (SFT) substitution approach; 4) assess ecological vulnerability of nature forest to climate change and ecosystem services function.