Abstrakt
Mountains have always fascinated humans. Their remoteness, grandiosity, stability, and wilderness awake in most of us admiration, which motivates us to climb their steep slopes again and again.
The pure biological perspective is fascinating, too. Over relatively small spatial scales, montane elevational gradients support a variety of environments, thus leading to biogeographical patterns with an elevated diversity of species.
This is especially true in the tropics, where stable climatic conditions across different scales of time reinforce the effects of geographical isolation and thus support the origin and maintenance of biological diversity. In Africa, temperate and sub-tropical mountains hold as much local diversity and endemism as do the tropical mountains, such as the exceptional plant diversity in the Cape Fold Mountains of South Africa and the rich local endemism in the Atlas Mountains in northern Africa.