Mountain regions have been influenced significantly by human activity throughout time and space. Today, the vegetation in the Alps is embedded in a cultural landscape featuring highly diverse habitats. These contribute substantially to the overall biodiversity but are simultaneously affected by global change influences.

Understanding the resilience as well as the vulnerability of alpine habitats is important for developing protection strategies to counteract the increasing environmental and anthropogenic pressures. To identify these major pressures on alpine habitats, multifactorial studies addressing the interaction of multiple drivers imposing these pressures are crucial. Only by studying multiple drivers and aiming for a compromise between highest complementarity and least redundancy, a representative picture of alpine habitats in a broader ecological context can be drawn. However, describing these complex interactions remains a challenge to most studies. This challenge will be addressed in this workshop, where the participants will exchange views on the most important drivers leading to changes in alpine habitats.

We will develop a conceptual framework for a case study about potential drivers that can lead to equilibrium shifts in an alpine habitat and the thereon resulting consequences.We will focus on describing the complex relationship between vulnerability and exposure to potential pressures, while also considering resilience and potential adaptive capacity of alpine habitats. Further, we will elaborate on nature’s complexity and the representativeness of conceptual frameworks in general. We will ask ourselves: Is science yet eligible to reflect such complex structures?