GLORIA

The Global Observation Initiative in Alpine Environments (GLORIA) is an international science program based in Vienna, Austria that promotes monitoring the responses of high-elevation plants to long-term climate change. GLORIA capitalizes on standardized protocols developed by a wide collaboration of scientists, and exploits the relative comparability of alpine summit environments worldwide. The basic GLORIA approach depends on "Multi-Summit Target Regions", for which inventory and monitoring are prescribed on four mountain summits per target region. The summits are selected to be within a single bioclimatic region and to extend from treeline elevation to the nival zone. Sites are instrumented with temperature dataloggers, and are extensively photo-documented. All data are archived at the international headquarters and data are available to all interested scientists.

Principle Contacts for North American GLORIA are:

• Dan Fagre, USGS, dan_fagre[at]usgs.gov