Hello!

We will meet - at least virtually - during various lessons of this course. I was first exposed to alpine ecology, just like you right now, in lectures during my early student days in Innsbruck, Austria. This is a place amidst the Alps, whereas Basel, my current work place is in the corner of Switzerland furthest away from the Alps. Perhaps this distance from surroundings so familiar to me together with impressions from visiting many other mountain areas has nourished the idea of synthesising what we actually know about Alpine Plant Life in a book with this title. The lessons I am presenting here are partly extracted from the chapters of this volume (a new edition in 2003).

I found it challenging to condense essentials on alpine environmental conditions and alpine plant responses to these conditions into a few clear cut and short statements per screen. Why essentials? Why condense? Well, I guess a screen is not read like a book and visual impressions need to substitute for a lot of text. If you feel you need more indepth information, please consult the relevant chapters in my book or send me an email (ch.koerner@unibas.ch). There is a risk of oversimplification, but there is also a risk of getting drowned in detail in what is meant to be a 45 minute lesson. I hope you find the attempted compromise worth the effort. The screens for my lectures were prepared by Thomas Zumbrunn, who did all this in parallel to his diploma thesis on in situ alpine dwarf shrub responses to a CO₂ enriched atmosphere in the Swiss Alps.

Christian Körner