BayCEER Workshop 2025

Inland cliffs call for plant conservation efforts and new research in vegetation ecology

Cliffs are landscape anomalies occurring across the globes in differente bioclimatic areas. They act as microrefugia and center of endemism, hosting unique plants with special adaptations to resource limited environments. Due to their inaccessibility, cliffs have been historically preserved by the impact of human activities, even in proximity to anthropogenic landscapes. However, these highly specialized habitats are increasingly threatened by human induced global changes and the rising popularity of outdoor activities such as rock climbing. Although cliff vegetation is primarily shaped by edaphic constraints and thus classified as azonal, climatic variability might also play a role. This phenomenon is known as intrazonality, which increases this vegetation's vulnerability to the impacts of climate change due to isolation. Cliff vegetation has historically been underrepresented in ecological studies, with scarce macroecological studies addressing its variability across large spatial scales. These gaps are increasingly being bridged thanks to the advent of new technologies, such as unmanned aerial systems, which greatly improve the sampling opportunities in these challenging environments. We present a review on the existing literature regarding inland cliff vegetation and offer a concise overview of its key characteristics, while highlighting significant plant functional and macroecological knowledge gaps that currently exist. Our focus will be on global change drivers. Finally, we will share preliminary results from a functional macroecological study on intrazonality across various biogeographic regions including alpine, temperate and mediterranean, aiming to provide valuable insights into the potential impacts of future climate change on the vegetation of cliff faces.