A new study by scientists has found that it's not just climate that affects mountain tree lines

Science and Technology Daily (Liu Xiaoxuan reporter Lu Chengguang) Recently, researchers at the
Qinghai-Tibet Plateau have made important theoretical progress in the field of the driving mechanism of tree line change in the mountains, arguing that in addition to climatic reasons, competition and mutual benefit among trees have also affected the rate of tree line change in the middle of the Himalayas. The results were published online in the Journal of Biometrics.
alpine tree line is the upper limit of the tree distribution, and higher up, the vegetation on the mountain becomes a meadow. In the Himalayas, the continuous distribution of alpine tree lines is a sensitive indicator of the impact of climate change on high-cold ecosystems, and the rate of change has been of concern to the international ecological community.
background of warming, tree line locations will theoretically migrate to higher altitudes. However, studies have shown that tree line rise lags behind warming rates. Liang
, a researcher at the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau Institute, said.
researchers found that the rate of tree line rise was limited not only by precipitation and interseth competition, but also by in-plant relationships. The so-called in-plant relationship refers to competition and mutual benefit among trees. With the decrease of precipitation, tree seedlings tend to cluster distribution, cluster strength and tree line climbing rate significantly negative correlation, the greater the adjacent distance between trees, the faster the climb rate, the slower the climb rate, the tree line climbing rate of 34.7% by the tree cluster distribution intensity.
further studies confirm that temperature-precipitation interactions affect the distribution of tree seedling clusters and thus regulate tree line climbing rates, which is an important theoretical advance in the study of the driving mechanism of tree line changes in mountain mountains, the researchers said.