By Sarah Zimmermann, Ecology & Biodiversity student, Austria
In summer 2025, I joined the RangeX team at the University of Bergen under the supervision of Nadine Arzt, PhD candidate of Prof. Vigdis Vandvik. I am a master student in Ecology & Biodiversity and Botany at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, supervised by Prof. Michael Bahn. As part of a collaboration for my thesis, I spent several weeks in the Norwegian mountains near Voss together with the RangeX team, working at our high-elevation field site.
We stayed in a simple cabin without electricity or phone reception, with water from a nearby stream – a very basic but wonderful setting that allowed us to fully focus on the fieldwork and the alpine environment. Our days were spent carrying out community analysis of the plots that are part of the RangeX network. It was rewarding fieldwork, and I learned a lot about alpine vegetation – especially the many species of Carex – while experiencing the strong teamwork and commitment of everyone involved.
Some of the collected data also laid the foundation for my master’s thesis. Building on the RangeX experiment, I will investigate how the presence of transplanted lowland species (the “focals”) and experimental warming by OTCs affect the flowering of native alpine plants. Flowering will be used as a proxy for fertility, allowing me to assess whether increased competition from novel species and higher temperatures alter the reproductive potential of established alpine species.
My analyses will take advantage of the factorial design of the experiment, which enables me to examine both the individual effects of warming and competition as well as their interactions. For example, I will test whether warming generally enhances flowering, and whether this effect is reduced or intensified when lowland competitors are present. Beyond flowering responses, I plan to explore patterns in community composition using multivariate approaches such as principal component analysis.
Through this work, I hope to shed light on one of the key ecological questions of climate change in mountain regions: how will alpine plants cope with simultaneous pressures from climate change and novel competitors? Understanding these dynamics is essential for predicting future community structures in mountain ecosystems, for identifying potential “winners” and “losers” of ongoing environmental change, and thereby for developing feasible protection measures.
