Indian Peaks Vegetation Survey, 2013.

The purpose of this project was to determine the environmental variables most likely to differentiate alpine plant communities, assess whether they were the same within and across regions, and to explore the relative importance of environmental difference and geographic distance in the differentiation of communities. We hoped that the analyses might allow inference about the range of responses of these communities to climate change. We examine the broad climatic versus the local environmental factors that affect the assemblage of plant communities. We initially intended to resample some of the plots described by Komarkova based on the point map included in her dissertation, but the places we visited using the coordinates digitized from her map were not similar to her site descriptions, so an alternate method of site selection was used (see methods for details).