Professor John Ford Shroder teaches geografy and geology at the University of Nebraska, in Omaha, since 1969. He is author of lots of books and he took part in important committees, as the Unesco and the Geological Society of America.
Christian Körner is professor of Botany at the University of Basilea, in Switzerland. He studied at the University of Innsbruck, in Austria, and he si an expert of alpine plants. From 1977 he has taken part at lots of projects in several countries, as Austria, Sweden, Argentina, Venezuela and Australia.
High altitude ecosystems cover a comparatively small fraction of the European landscape but exert major influences on large forelands through hydrological teleconnection. I will present some geostatistics on high altitude biota and will discuss basic responses of these to a warmer, CO2 enriched atmosphere, nitrogen deposition and land use.
Stefan Grab è Associated professor at the School of Geography, Arch. & Enviro. Studies, at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Sud Africa. He teaches in Geography and Environmental Studies, and he studied Periglacial geomorphology and climate change analysis in African Mountain Environments.
Sergio Castellari graduated in Physics at University of Bologna, in Italy and then he received a Ph.D. in Physical Oceanography from University of Miami, USA. He works as science expert for the Italian Ministry for the Environment, an is the IPCC National Focal Point for Italy.
The IPCC-AR4 (Fourth Assessment Report), published in 2007, has stressed that the warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is evident from several observations in different sectors and also has shown the following observed impacts on the global mountain areas: (1) a decrease of the snow cover and ice, especially from the year 1980; (2) a reduction of most of the mountain glaciers; (3) an anticipated reduction of the snow cover in the Spring.
Professor Riccardo Valentini works at the Laboratorio di Ecologia Forestale della Facoltà di Agraria of the Università degli Studi della Tuscia, in Viterbo. He studies forest ecology and biogeochemistry, particularly carbon balance estimation by means of different methodologies including eddy covariance measurements and models.
He works at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (Ird) di Greatice Legge, the Laboratoire de Glaciologie et de Géophysique of Grenoble. Patrik Wagnon is a specialist in climate-glacier relationship in tropical environment: mass and energy balance on Andean and Himalayan glaciers.
