Climate change is the most urgent issue since we have encountered impactful consequences in the past few decades, such as strong typhoons, extreme rainfalls, and even hot winters. Dr. Cheng-Tao Lin from the Department of Biological Resources leads a team to enter the heart of Central Mountain Ranges and Hsueh-Shan Mountain Ranges to monitor the influences of alpine summit vegetation induced by climate change. This project is funded by Forestry Bureau and has continued for over a decade. The former project investigator Dr. Ho-Yi Liu (National Sun Yat-sen University), who initiated this project, has surveyed many summits in Taiwan and established preliminary monitoring sites following a standard procedure named GLORIA (Global Observation Research Initiative on Alpine Environments) multi-summit approach. The data collected through the past three resurveys showed a significant temperature increase among the high-mountain summits in Taiwan. Dr. Lin’s team also found there was a declining tendency of water balance because the potential evapotranspiration significantly increased from 2014–2019....read more