Vegetation structure and aboveground biomass of Páramo peatlands along a high-elevation gradient in the northern Ecuadorian Andes.

The high-elevation peatlands of the páramos of the northern Andes constitute a diverse environment that harbors large numbers of species and several types of plant communities along altitudinal, latitudinal, and environmental gradients. However, little is known about the structure and functioning of these ecosystems, including peatland vegetation types and their relative contribution to the production and accumulation of peat soils. In this paper we characterized the structure of peatland plant communities of the humid páramos of northern Ecuador by describing the distribution of plant growth-forms and their aboveground biomass patterns.

Mountain wetland soil carbon stocks of Huascarán National Park, Peru.

Although wetlands contain a disproportionately high amount of earth's total soil carbon, many regions are still poorly mapped and with unquantified carbon stocks. The tropical Andes contain a high concentration of wetlands consisting mostly of wet meadows and peatlands, yet their total organic carbon stocks are poorly quantified, as well as the carbon fraction that wet meadows store compared to peatlands. Therefore, our goal was to quantify how soil carbon stocks vary between wet meadows and peatlands for a previously mapped Andean region, Huascarán National Park, Peru.

Multidate, multisensor remote sensing reveals high density of carbon-rich mountain peatlands in the páramo of Ecuador.

Tropical peatlands store a significant portion of the global soil carbon (C) pool. However, tropical mountain peatlands contain extensive peat soils that have yet to be mapped or included in global C estimates. This lack of data hinders our ability to inform policy and apply sustainable management practices to these peatlands that are experiencing unprecedented high rates of land use and land cover change.