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How climate and human activity shape a mountain ecosystem

A detailed biological assessment of Africa’s highest mountain explores how climate modulates the effects of human land use on plants, animals, microorganisms and a diverse array of ecosystem functions.
  1. Robert M. Pringle

    1. Robert M. Pringle is in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA.

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Mountains support roughly one-third of all land-dwelling species and supply water for nearly half of all people1. The ecology of mountain environments is strongly influenced by climate2–4. For example, because temperatures drop as altitude increases, organisms that have greater cold tolerance are favoured at higher elevations. Accordingly, there is a rapid change in the species present as one moves up a mountain from the warm lowlands to the cold highlands. And because few organisms can withstand the most-extreme conditions, the total number of species tends to be low on mountaintops.

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Nature 568, 38-39 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00939-8

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