GLORIA

GLORIA is a monitoring network of permanent one-metre-square plots laid out just below mountain summits. As described by Jonas Lembrechts of The 3D lab in September 2026, the network has resurveyed the same plots on 62 summits across 16 European mountain ranges every seven years since 2001, which gives four surveys and 21 years of records from 896 plots.

Those records are the basis of a study published in Science in 2026, led by Johannes Wessely and Stefan Dullinger with GLORIA colleagues. It finds that local extinctions of plant species on the summits have risen and are speeding up from one survey to the next, at the scale of plots, summits and whole ranges. Summit species counts have still gone up, because lowland species arrive faster than cold-adapted specialists disappear. Each extra 0.1 °C of warming over the preceding 14 years went with a measurable rise in the extinction rate, and warming explained the pattern better than time alone. Species were most likely to vanish from their warm, low-elevation margins, and a decline in cover was an early though noisy warning sign. The author suggests the losses may be the first instalment of an extinction debt from past warming.

The source read does not say how the network's data are accessed or licensed.

Status: an ongoing observational network, with the fourth survey completed and published in 2026.