Climate variability and change in high elevation regions: Past, present and future

This special issue of Climatic Change contains a series of research and review articles, arising from papers that were presented and discussed at a workshop held in Davos, Switzerland on 25 - 28 June 2001. The workshop was titled 'Climate Change at High Elevation Sites: Emerging Impacts', and was convened to reprise an earlier conference on the same subject that was held in Wengen, Switzerland in 1995 ( Diaz et al., 1997). The Davos meeting had as its main goals, a discussion of the following key issues: ( 1) reviewing recent climatic trends in high elevation regions of the world, ( 2) assessing the reliability of various biological indicators as indicators of climatic change, and ( 3) assessing whether physical impacts of climatic change in high elevation areas are becoming evident, and to discuss a range of monitoring strategies needed to observe and to understand the nature of any changes.