Abstract
The páramo landscape consists of natural grasslands above the closed forest line (generally at 3000–3500m asl—above sea level) and below the glaciers (4500–5000m asl), where these are present. They cover ~35,000km2 extending across Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and northern Peru and a number of small patches between Costa Rica and Panamá. They constitute an ecological archipelago, distributed along the highest parts of the northern Andes. The vegetation is subjected to large daily temperature fluctuations, and mist cover alternates with high solar irradiation. Therefore, organisms have developed unique adaptive strategies to cope with abiotic conditions in this extreme environment, leading to important processes of speciation and evolutionary convergence. This has resulted in high endemism and a remarkable plant diversity, the highest among all alpine landscapes in the world (Fig. 1).
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