Recent Development of Mountain Slopes in Kärkevagge and Surroundings, Northern Scandinavia

Relationship between climate change and vegetation distribution in the Mediterranean mountains: Manzanares Head valley, Sierra De Guadarrama (Central Spain)

“…To this end, an adaptation of the painted blocks method was used (Rapp 1960;Nyberg 1991;Palacios and García 1997a;Palacios et al 2003;Andrés and Palacios 2004), which consisted in setting a 10 × 10 m grid to monitor the displacement, in centimeters, of at least one block within each square, making annual records over the period 1996-2004. To analyze the changes in the distribution of vegetation, a cartography was developed on vegetation covers from the available aerial photographs (Comunidad de Madrid) at five different dates, in the summers of 1957, 1972, 1984, 1991 and 1998. The interpretation for 1998 was conducted on digital orthophotos with a resolution of 1 × 1 m/pixel and a minimal mappable area of 100 m 2 .…”

“…This index is based on the percent area of each vegetation class that matches the area of the different intervals of number of days with snow cover/year, and results from the weighed average of all percent values recorded. Likewise, the 1998 vegetation map was related to the geomorphic map, and the percent area of each vegetation class which matches the different classes of landforms ranked according to their mobility-using an adaptation of Rapp (1960) and Nyberg's (1991) was measured.…”

Landslides and Rockfalls

“…Rapp, 1960;Caine and Swanson, 1989;Schrott et al, 2002;Otto and Dikau, 2004;Beylich et al, 2005;Slaymaker, 2008), resulting in a reliance on exploiting the scaling properties of landslides to model landslide contribution. Landslide flux volumes have been shown to exhibit powerlaw (Kelsey et al, 1995) or fractal (Hovius, Stark and Allen, 1997) distributions.…”

“…Demonstrated controls include rain storms (Rapp, 1960;Sandersen et al, 1996;Sass, 1998), daily temperature cycling including ice melt (Gardner, 1980), vertical migration of the permafrost boundary (Haeberli, 1999), macrogelivation -the exploitation of rock structures by ice, and microgelivation -the exploitation of rock independent of structure (Tricart, 1956), microbiological action (Andr e, 1997), root prying (Sass, Wetzel and Friedmann, 2006), animal movement (Gorers and Presen, 1998), creep (Rapp, 1960) and wind (Blackwelder, 1942).…”

Soil processes and nutrient bioavailability in the rhizosphere of Bolax gummifera in a subantarctic environment (Martial Mountains, Ushuaia—Argentina)

“…Organic matter acts as a fuel for microorganism activity, which in turn accelerates weathering processes and mobilization of macro-and micronutrients. Plants also play a fundamental role in weathering processes and mobilization of elements as they are capable of releasing organic acids with a strong complexing capacity (malate, citrate, oxalate…) (Jones, 1998;Rengel, 2002;Jones et al, 2004;Rengel and Marschner, 2005), which also boosts primary mineral weathering (Caine, 1979;Darmody and Thorn, 1997;Dixon et al, 1984;Rapp, 1960). The rhizosphere soil (RS) thus represents a microenvironment in which the influence of plants on the substrate is especially important, as the presence of plants confers different properties in this part of soil than in the bulk soil (Gobran et al, 1998;Herlihy, 2008;Marschner et al, 1987).…”