Today marked the second event in the MRI Anniversary Lecture Series, celebrating 20 years since the MRI Coordination Office was founded in 2001. This series aims to showcase MRI synthesis workshop research and build capacity in the mountain research community.

Invited speaker Maaike Bader is a professor in biogeography at the University of Marburg, Germany. Her work focuses on plant functioning in mountain ecosystems, at scales from individual seedlings and moss communities to global patterns. She particularly enjoys discussing the ecological processes controlling alpine treeline ecotone dynamics.

Alpine treeline ecotones mark the upper limit of tree cover in mountains all around the globe. This transition zone can take many different shapes, from discrete boundaries to wide zones of slowly diminishing tree size and cover. These different patterns reflect underlying processes, so that they can be used to understand how treelines are shaped and how they might respond to changes in driving factors, in particular climate. In this presentation, Maaike shares a recent framework for describing spatial patterns at alpine treelines and discusses what different patterns may tell us about treeline formation and dynamics.

View the lecture below:

Download the presentation slides here. Read Bader and others' (2021) Ecography  article here. 

Follow Maaike's example: apply for MRI Synthesis Workshop funding. 

Find more information about the next MRI Anniversary Lecture here. 

Cover image by cafepampas.