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).