The world's mountains support approximately one quarter of terrestrial biological diversity, with nearly half of the world’s biodiversity hotspots concentrated in mountains. Isolated mountains (such as Mount Kinabalu in Malaysia) are often rich in endemic species: plants and animals that occur nowhere else. In the alpine belt (the treeless life zone of mountains, ca. three percent of the global land-area), around four percent of the global number of flowering plant species (about 10,000 alpine species) are estimated to occur, which means that the alpine life zone is richer in plant species than would be expected from its area. A biological inventory of the world’s mountains does not yet exist, but data mining of existing archives of biodiversity offer new avenues to assess mountain biodiversity. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) established a data portal www.gbif.org that connects more than 174 million single species occurrence records fromvarious data providers such as natural history museum collections. In cooperation with GBIF, the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment (GMBA) of DIVERSITAS is currently developing a thematic mountain portal, which will allow specific searches for primary biodiversity data in mountains.
