Global Change in Mountain Regions The Mountain Research Initiative

Low abiotic stress No specific adaptations (ecotype) High disturbance High propagule pressure High competition High abiotic stress Low disturbance Low propagule pressure Specific adaptations (ecotype) Low High hindering invasion promoting invasion Altitude This Newsletter comes out twice a year. Editors: Claudia Drexler and Gregory Greenwood. Design and Layout: Claudia Drexler The MRI and its products are supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to subscribe directly to the MRI database please go to The Mountain Research Initiative continues to strengthen and expand its role as a hub of global mountain research. The third MRI Newsletter is ample proof of these efforts. It includes contributions on the character of mountain areas as " model systems for understanding drivers of plant invasion " and their significance for ensuring the water supply well into their foothills, under conditions of global change. Regional studies in Poland and Peru present and discuss global change and adaptation strategies. By integrating such national and regional studies into international research and networks, it is possible to make much better use of their findings. This is where the MRI has an important role to play, as it does in its large-scale involvement in a new EU project of the 7th Framework Programme " Mountain. TRIP: Mountain Sustainability: Transforming Research into Practice " , which will work out new methods transferring research findings into the world of the practitioners. With the bulk of contributions on natural science research and events, the new MRI Newsletter also indicates two weak points of mountain research everywhere. The focus is much more on climate change as such and its effects on ecosystems and much less on the impact it has on the people living in mountain areas. Moreover, global change is often reduced to climate change. However, globalization with its impact on the economy, on culture, demographics and policies – as well as on the environment – affects mountain systems just as severely as climate change and calls for sustainable adaptation strategies. Here geography, in the sense of a sys-temic science, can develop and disseminate integrative approaches and solutions. In addition, we need the involvement of economics, regional economics , political science, sociology and cultural studies. In 006, an Institute for Mountain Research: Man and Environment (IGF) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) was established in Innsbruck. It is headed by the author, …