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It is increasingly becoming recognized that the alpine life zone, defined as that vegetation occurring above the upper natural treeline on mountains (Körner, 2003), provides an impressive replicated, large-scale natural experiment, and thus an ideal system for studying macroecological patterns, and ecological and evolutionary processes. Although covering a relatively small proportion of the earth’s terrestrial area (ca. 3%)(Körner, 2003), alpine vegetation is amply represented in both hemispheres, where it is found on all continents, and globally extends from subpolar to equatorial latitudes. Alpine vegetation in many parts of the world, unlike much subtending lowland vegetation, is still relatively well conserved (cf. Nogués-Bravo et al., 2008), thus providing greater assurance that any broad patterns detected in the alpine will reflect nonanthropogenic processes. Characterized by the compression of the equivalent temperature conditions found along large distances of the latitudinal gradient into relatively short distances along steep altitudinal gradients, many macroecological patterns can be profitably investigated in the alpine life zone. For example, the physically compact alpine gradient provides an excellent system for detecting the effect of land area on patterns of species richness (Körner, 2000; Gorelick, 2008), and thus could go a long way in illuminating our understanding of the latitudinal species gradient, where differences in land area between the tropical and temperate zones becomes a major confounding factor. Because the mean growing season temperature theoretically should not vary significantly for alpine surfaces at different latitudes …