Mountains "threatened on all sides", the alarm cry of scientists

• Global warming, soil artificialization, importation of new pathogens… Researchers specializing in mountains have identified six threats hanging over our mountains.

• The call, which left Toulouse, is signed by 22 scientists of 11 nationalities.

• For them, mountain ecosystems have reached “a tipping point” and action must be taken before it is too late.

“Herds that come down from the summer pastures much earlier because there is nothing left to eat up there.

Or hikers desperately looking for famous waterfalls reduced to a drip, or even a "place where the water still flows".

Dirk Schmeller and Adeline Loyau, researchers from the Functional Ecology and Environment Laboratory of Toulouse* (LEFE), attended this heartbreaking spectacle this summer, during their traditional campaigns in the Pyrenees.

Not particularly surprised.

Co-sign our article "Scientists' warning of threats to mountains" and give it the strength to convince decision makers that we need change!

https://t.co/PvbsYPiGS3 pic.twitter.com/7jzCqCKaDD

— Dirk S. Schmeller (@DSSchmeller) September 15, 2022

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These researchers, who six months ago revealed that certain limpid altitude lakes with paradisiacal appearances could contain real toxic cocktails and advised to think twice before filling a gourd in them, are used to being ominous birds.

And since the situation is not only worsening in "their" Pyrenees, since they have clearly noted that, even in summer, it is now dangerous to climb the Alpine glaciers, they are going to the top speed.

They are at the origin of a global alert on the threats which weigh, in the whole world, on the mountains, these ecosystems more fragile than the others.

Written by 22 scientists, of eleven different nationalities,

"Raise awareness"

"We don't want to play the killjoy, what we want is to raise awareness", insists Dirk Schmeller for whom, obviously, the main threat remains global warming, "much stronger in the mountains than at low altitude ".

Hydroelectric dams, which combine "excessive water abstraction" and "land artificialization" are also in its sights, as are the impacts of mass tourism.

Scientists also identify other less obvious dangers such as the famous "poisoning" which delight anglers, sometimes with the risk of introducing, at the same time as fish, "pathogens" or toxic algae. unknown in an ecosystem already weakened by the rise in water temperature.

The picture is dark, very dark.

But Dirk Schmeller, tired of preaching in the desert when he gives expert advice for the National Council for the Protection of Nature, is convinced that we are “coming to a tipping point” for the mountains.

“The shock absorbers could break on impact.

If decisions are not made, nature will do it for us”, warns, pessimistic, Adeline Loyau.

*

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• Planet

• Pyrenees

• Mountain

• Toulouse

• Occitania

• Global warming

• Biodiversity

• Science