Keeping WaRM at high altitudes – the Marsden Flag heads into the mountains
The Marsden Fund flag recently joined Associate Professor Julie Deslippe of Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington on a trip to China for some high-altitude field work
Published on 11 Hui-tanguru February 2025
Dr Deslippe and her colllaborators are investigating how climate warming and invasive species are likely to impact sensitive alpine ecosytems. They have established experimental plots at various altitudes in mountain ranges across the world (including Aotearoa, Australia, China, the USA, Argentina, Switzerland and France), where they can manipulate temperature and species composition and observe the effects on local plant communities. These sites are part of the Warming and Removals in Mountains, or WaRM, network.
During a recent trip to China for the International Mountain Forum, Dr Deslippe took the opportunity to meet up with collaborators from the Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment (IMHE, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chengdu) and the University of Bergen (Norway). Together, they visited high-altitude WaRM sites in the western Sichuan Ganzi Prefecture to explore a collaborative study on soil microbes and their interactions with plant communities.
Above: Associate Professor Deslippe, Mao Wen Jing (IMHE) and Dagmar Egelkraut (University of Bergen, Norway) at ~4000m above sea level in the grassland ecosystems of the Ganzi Prefecture. Collaborator Professor Yan Yang (IMHE) runs long-term warming and sod transplant experiments here. Below: A panorama of the landscape. Photos supplied.
The research by Dr Deslippe and her colleagues will show us how vulnerable alpine ecosystems are to rapid global change, allowing us to better manage native biodiversity and biological invasions.
You can read about some of the findings from the Aotearoa-based WaRM sites in this Research Update.
Associate Professor Deslippe is the Principal Investigator on Marsden Fund contract VUW2002, “Changing climate and biodiversity in the mountains: understanding the interactive effects of warming, species extinction and invasions on ecosystem function”. Her Rutherford Discovery Fellowship (awarded 2022) also utilises the WaRM network, and focuses specifically on how the interactions between plants and symbiotic fungi might modulate the effects of climate warming.