tajikistan is a hotspot of plant and animal species diversity and endemism andis important for the conservation of biodiversity on a global scale. the country is located ata biological crossroads. species from central and northern europe, central asia, themiddle east, and north africa mingle here with endemics found nowhere else. therichness of tajikistan‘s biodiversity shows up at the genetic,...

The Tienshan Urumqi Glacier No.1 (TUG1) usually shows "grey" surfaces in summers. Besides known regional warming, what should be responsible for largely reducing its surface albedo and making it look "grey"? A field campaign was conducted on the TUG1 on a selected cloud-free day of 2013 after a snow fall at night. Fresh and aged snow samples were collected in the field, and snow densities, grai...

—We found evidence of birds nesting directly on glacier ice of the Quelccaya Ice Cap in the Cordillera Vilcanota, Perú at elevations up to 5,300 m. Observations during June and July over several years consisted of numerous nests not in situ having obviously fallen from the steep and dynamic, retreating glacier margin. A typical nest was a bulky structure of grass and twigs with a dry mass of 16...

Birds, particularly passerines, can be parasitized by Ixodid ticks, which may be infected with tick-borne pathogens, like Borrelia spp., Babesia spp., Anaplasma, Rickettsia/Coxiella, and tick-borne encephalitis virus. The prevalence of ticks on birds varies over years, season, locality and different bird species. The prevalence of ticks on different species depends mainly on the degree of feedi...

In this study, six bacterial community structures were analyzed from the Dunde ice core (9.5-m-long) using 16S rRNA gene cloning library technology. Compared to the Muztagata mountain ice core (37-m-long), the Dunde ice core has different dominant community structures, with five genus-related groups Blastococcus sp./Propionibacterium, Cryobacterium-related., Flavobacterium sp., Pedobacter sp., ...

Microbial communities on polar glacier surfaces are found dispersed on the ice surface, or concentrated in cryoconite holes and cryolakes, which are accumulations of debris covered by a layer of ice for some or all of the year. The ice lid limits the penetration of photosynthetically available radiation (PAR) to the sediment layer, since the ice attenuates up to 99% of incoming radiation. This ...

The climatic mechanisms driving the shift from the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) to the Little Ice Age (LIA) in the North Atlantic region are debated. We use cosmogenic beryllium-10 dating to develop a moraine chronology with century-scale resolution over the last millennium and show that alpine glaciers in Baffin Island and western Greenland were at or near their maximum LIA configurations during...

Arctic climate change has profound impacts on the cryosphere, notably via shrinking sea-ice cover and retreating glaciers, and it is essential to evaluate and forecast the ecological consequences of such changes. We studied zooplankton-feeding little auks (Alle alle), a key sentinel species of the Arctic, at their northernmost breeding site in Franz-Josef Land (80°N), Russian Arctic. We tested ...