News

January 2011

New Co-Chair

Aníbal Pauchard (University of Concepción, Chile), founding member of MIREN, has been elected as a new Co-Chair of MIREN. He is the successor of Curtis C. Daehler (University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI, USA), who co-chaired MIREN between 2008 and 2010.

September 2010

MIREN annual meeting in Perth, Scotland

The fifth MIREN annual meeting was held in Perth, Scotland on the 24th and 25th of September, 2010, prior to the Global Change and the World's Mountains conference (see Workshops).

February 2010

Recent media coverage of MIREN

The overview article by MIREN on the risks of plant invasions into mountain ecosystems recently published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment¹ has led to considerable media interest. It has for instance been covered by La Repubblica² – the second largest Italian daily newspaper, ETH Life³ – the webjournal of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, the February issue of IUCN's Science Bulletin⁴, UNEP's 2009 Climate Change Science Compendium⁵, and numerous online news services worldwide including Science daily⁵. The article has also triggered an exchange of letters in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment on the importance of reaching out to developing countries in invasive species research and management in mountains^6,7.
 

September 2009

MIREN meeting at EMAPi 10 conference, Stellenbosch, South Africa

MIREN was well represented at this year’s Ecology and Management of Alien Plant Invasions (EMAPI ) meeting in Stellenbosch, South Africa.
Anibal Pauchard and José Arévalo organised a special symposium on Mountain Invasions, providing an opportunity to present work conducted
by MIREN and beyond. The talks covered a diverse range of topics including drivers of altitudinal gradients in species richness, biotic
homogenisation, local adaptation and life history variation within introduced populations.

The meeting also provided the opportunity to meet potential new collaborators, particularly from Africa, who hope to conduct alien
species surveys and to participate in the core-species traits study now being initiated.

July 2009

Recent outreach activities of MIREN

MIREN has recently been present at a number of workshops where the MIREN network has been presented as an innovative institutional model and where preventive measures against plant invasions into mountains have been promoted:

Maja Küng, a Bachelor student at ETH Zurich, has prepared a preliminary list of potentially invasive plant species for the European Alps as well as a draft management strategy against plant invasions in the European Alps. Maja has presented and discussed these documents together with Christoph Kueffer at an ECONNECT international pilot region meeting in Zernez (CH), 18-20 May 2009.

Jake Alexander and Christoph have presented a poster at the Niche Evolution Conference, University of Zurich (CH), 3-4 July 2009 on alien species as model systems for niche evolution and the MIREN approach to study plant invasions in mountains.

Christoph has also represented MIREN at a round table on environmental monitoring and integrated networks in mountains at the SHARE International Conference organised by Ev-K2-CNR in Milan (Italy), 27-28 May 2009.

Catherine Parks has been asked to give a presentation on MIREN at an international ungulate-forestry workshop in La Grande, (Oregon, USA). One of the main tasks of the workshop is to write a project proposal(s) to form an international ungulate-forestry research network and to raise funding for continued networking and preferably collaborative research projects.

Finally, MIREN has just published an article on the need for preventive measures against plant invasions into mountains in the July 2009 issue of the Mountain Forum Bulletin.

March 2009

Curt Daehler represents MIREN on GMBA steering committee

Curt Daehler attended the GMBA Steering Committee meeting held in Washington DC on 13 February 2009. Curt replaces Hansjoerg Dietz as the representative of MIREN on the GMBA scientific steering committee.

December 2008

Workshop 2008, Charlottes Pass, Australian Alps, Australia

The fourth MIREN workshop was held at Charlottes Pass, a small ski resort at treeline in Kosciuszko National Park (a Mountain Biosphere Reserve in the Australian Alps) between the 1st and 5th of December. The meeting was funded by the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Environment and Climate Change and the Australian Alps National Parks program. The meeting included much discussion of current MIREN programs (conceptual framework, concurrent core area surveys, and database development) and future programs (demographic experiments, outreach and studies on impacts). An open session brought MIREN members into contact with Park managers resulting in lively discussion about prioritization of management actions for invasive species.

For more information see http://www.miren.ethz.ch/workshops/

June 2008

New Co-Chair

Keith McDougall, member of the core MIREN group from the beginning, has been elected as a new Co-Chair of MIREN. He is the successor of Hansjörg Dietz (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) who co-chaired MIREN between 2005 and 2008. Keith's employer, the NSW Dept of Environment and Climate Change (Australia) is the manager of a Mountain Biosphere Reserve (Kosciuszko National Park). The appointment of Keith and Curt (University of Hawaii) continues the successful example of past co-chairs Catherine Parks and Hanjörg Dietz in guiding MIREN with the perspectives of an academic and a management organisation.

January 2008

New Co-Chair

Curtis C. Daehler (University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI, USA), member of the core MIREN group from the beginning, has been elected as a new Co-Chair of MIREN. He is the successor of Catherine C. Parks (USDA Forest Service at La Grande, Oregon, USA) who co-chaired MIREN between 2005 and 2007.

December 2007

BioChange project in Switzerland

Earlier this year, the large CCES-funded project “BioChange” began as a collaboration between several groups within the ETH domain to look at the relationship between genetic variation and the ability of mountain biota to adapt to environmental change. Within this project, a subgroup led by Peter Edwards at the ETH Zurich will address several aspects of plant invasions into mountains.
Regula Billeter, Oberassistentin at the ETH, will conduct experiments to assess the interaction of native community structure and abiotic factors on the invasibility of alien plants under different climate change scenarios.
Jake Alexander has recently started as a Postdoc to study patterns of adaptation and ecological amplitude along altitudinal gradients of European forbs which have been introduced to mountain regions around the world. Using seed accessions collected from several of the MIREN regions, these experiments will address to what extent the altitudinal amplitude of plants are conserved on introduction to a new range, and their potential to adapt to changing environmental conditions.
Both sets of experiments will be conducted in multiple common gardens along an altitudinal gradient shared by other members of BioChange in the upper Rhein valley in Switzerland.

November 2007

Completed PhD projects in Switzerland

Myriam Poll and Jake Alexander finished their joint PhD project this autumn, supervised by Prof. Peter Edwards and Dr. Hansjörg Dietz. The main aim of the project was to disentangle the relative roles of local adaptation, phenotypic plasticity and propagule pressure for limiting plant invasions into temperate mountain systems. Reciprocal studies were conducted in two comparable mountain regions (canton Valais in the southern Swiss Alps and the Wallowa Mountains in NE Oregon, USA) using a set of eight alien and native Asteraceae forbs common to both regions.

Myriam tackled these problems using transplant and common garden experiments in her thesis “Invasive potential of herbaceous Asteraceae in mountainous regions: an experimental approach”. Jake conducted roadside surveys of distributions and quantitative traits of the species along altitudinal gradients, as well as a study of microsatellite marker variation in mountain populations of Solidago candensis and Lactuca serriola, in his project “Patterns of distribution and traits of Asteraceae forbs along altitudinal gradients in their native and introduced ranges”.

Most species reached maximum altitudes in the introduced area that were at least as high as those found in the native area, indicating that neither low propagule pressure nor lack of adaptation prevents the invasion of high-altitude sites. Although genetic differences were found between low/high origin plants from both native and introduced areas, this ability to invade higher altitudes could be explained by their large phenotypic flexibility. Furthermore, this ability is apparently unrelated to levels of additive genetic variability within invading populations. The findings suggest that alien plants can respond very rapidly to changing conditions along altitudinal gradients, although their overall ecological (altitudinal) amplitude is usually conserved between ranges.

September 2007

New PhD project in Switzerland

The ETH has funded a new PhD project titled 'Changing causal processes in plant invasions: a demographic and experimental approach along environmental gradients' which will be supervised by Dr. Peter Edwards and Dr. Hansjörg Dietz. This project forms part of the MIREN core experimental program and will take place in the Rhein and Rhône valley regions of the Swiss Alps. The PhD student will be Tim Seipel who has worked in MIREN-related surveys before in the group of Dr. Lisa Rew (Montana, USA).
The PhD project will mainly combine demographic and experimental approaches to study the invasion of four introduced plant species. Repeated demographic surveys and mapping will be used to determine population growth rates along elevation gradients, comparing roadside and semi-natural habitats. Manipulative field and transplant experiments will provide information on species specific responses and elucidate ecological constraints.

June 2007

New MIREN project in Hawaii

In 2007, an USDA funded project started at the University of Hawaii at Manoa that aims at using invasions along steep elevational gradients for testing the application of species distribution modelling in invasive species risk assessment. The project is led by Curt Daehler with the assistance of a Postdoc, Christoph Kueffer, and a PhD student, Courtney Angelo. Christoph is the MIREN project coordinator and knows the network well, while Courtney is a newcomer and PhD student within the framework of MIREN.
In the project 25 herbs and grasses native to the European Alps and naturalised in Hawaii will be used to test the transferability of climate niches described in the native range to the introduced range for predicting risk areas. Comprehensive meteorological measurement networks were set up in Switzerland and Hawaii, and regular surveys of species occurences are under way. The project profits from the methodological expertise of Antoine Guisan (Université de Lausanne) and Christophe Randin (University of Colorado, Boulder) - two further MIREN members.

November 2006

2nd MIREN workshop

The second international MIREN workshop was held in Cove near La Grande (OR, USA) from 24 to 28 September 2006. This workshop focused on developing exact protocols for the systematic survey of alien plants along altitudinal gradients in all six core regions of MIREN. Click here for further information.

June 2006

The role of climate matching and climate change in plant invasions into higher mountains

A new PhD project has started at the Technical University of München-Freising (Germany) in collaboration with ETH Zurich (Switzerland) and the Universidad de la Laguna (Tenerife) which aims to identify the relative importance of climate matching for the invasion process of introduced plants from different climatic origins in the temperate Swiss Alps and sub-tropical Tenerife. Additional objectives are to assess potential future range shifts of invasive plants, with particular regard to global warming. With this project we also aim to sensitize and provide information for colleagues, politicians and the public on one of the serious candidate problems for maintaining the peculiar biodiversity of European mountain regions.

February 2006

MIREN acts as a DIVERSITAS-GMBA initiative

Hansjoerg Dietz has been nominated as ex-officio member of the scientific committee of the DIVERSITAS Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment (GMBA) cross-cutting network to represent MIREN.

DIVERSITAS is an international scientific program dedicated to the science of biodiversity supported by UNESCO and other organisations.

23 October 2005

The objectives of MIREN have become part of the GLOCHAMORE programme

The aims and approaches of MIREN were discussed at a working lunch held during the Open Science Conference in Perth. The participants of the conference passed a resolution on the achievements and the future tasks of the GLOCHAMORE programme, the 'Perth Declaration' that includes the problem of invasive species and the contribution of MIRENs approach to the management of mountain reserves.

22 August 2005

GLOCHAMORE Open Science Conference

2-6 October 2005, Perth, Scotland

MIREN seeks collaboration within the Global Change in Mountain Regions programme. It will present its aims and enter discussions during the Open Science Conference.

Further info: > GLOCHAMORE

22 August 2005

Launch of MIREN

The first international workshop on plant invasions into mountain regions was held near Vienna (Austria) from 15 to 17 July 2005. At the end of the workshop the global Mountain Invasion Research Network (MIREN) was launched.