The Western Pamirs (Tajikistan) under environmental change - Assessing vegetation change and associated ecosystem functions and services in the Rushan Range

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The Western Pamirs constitute a region of high biodiversity with more than 2000 vascular plant species, including 160 endemics, that perform essential ecosystem functions and provide key ecosystem services for the region and the adjacent lowlands. However, there is strong evidence that land cover and vegetation in the Pamirs are changing with negative impacts on ecosystem properties and associated functions and services. The aim of the proposed project is to detect and describe changes of vegetation and land cover in the Rushan Range (Western Pamirs), to understand their drivers, and to evaluate their impact on the ecosystem functioning and the provisioning of ecosystem services. A focus is on primary/biological production, water provisioning/regulation, and soil conservation as these were identified as ecosystem services of particular interest in the study area. Four research questions will be addressed in the project:1. Did land cover in the study area change in space and time?2. Did plant functional traits and associated ecosystem functions and services change in space and time?3. What are the predominant drivers of land cover and plant functional trait change in the study area?4. What is the impact of land cover and plant functional trait change on the provisioning of ecosystem services?The workflow can be divided into six main work packages (WP). WP 1 deals with the set-up of a remote sensing time series. WP 2 identifies land cover change in that time series. WP 3 focuses on the functional ecology in the study area and is highly dependent on field work. WP 4 merges the data of WP 1 and 3 by relating the field data to the remote sensing data. WP 5 uses the results of WP 4 to set up a plant functional trait time series and detect changes in that time series. The focus of WP 6 is on the evaluation of the results, particularly with regard to the drivers of the detected change.