Environmental change in the equatorial Andes: Linking climate, land use, and land cover transformations

Abstract

Global climate change is implicated in major socio-ecological transformations across a range of locations and geographic scales. Recent research has shown that climate change will be more pronounced in high-elevation mountain sites than in nearby lowland locales with consequences that may be felt much sooner and directly affect millions of people. In this study, we follow a land change science approach based on remote sensing, downscaled climate modeling, and regression analyses to investigate the connections between land use and land cover transformations and climate variation in the Cotopaxi National Park and its buffer zone in Ecuador. Results show an overall reduction of native grasslands between 1987 and 2013 and a significant glacier extent loss on the Cotopaxi volcano between 1976 and 2013. Decadal altitudinal shifts of main land cover types, specifically herbaceous vegetation, denuded soils, glacier, and upper montane evergreen vegetation are finely attuned with decadal changes in temperature. Results confirmed that decadal surface area changes of major land cover types in the region may be weakly associated with decadal changes in precipitation and moisture. If climate change and current land use practices continue to affect both the vertical and horizontal distribution major ecotypes, we could expect an overall restructure of the landscape across the latitudinal, longitudinal, and altitudinal dimensions in the short term. Resource users may need to adapt their land use systems to these new environmental conditions and search for resource management strategies that will enable them to sustain their livelihood practices in the long term.