Background: The impact of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystems is wide-ranging and challenging to predict as multiple factors, such as biotic interactions, evolutionary history, and land-use change, interact to drive species and ecosystem responses. Disentangling these drivers—through experimentation and long-term vegetation monitoring—is at the core of understanding how novel climatic regimes will shape biological communities and ecosystems.

Some such studies are included in international networks like the Global Observation Research Initiative for Alpine Environments (GLORIA)––a worldwide long-term observation network with permanent plots—and the International Páramo and Puna Experiment (IPPEX)––a global network of in situ warming experiments that adapted protocols from the International Tundra Experiment (ITEX). Together, the GLORIA Andes and IPPEX networks provide unique insights into high-elevation neotropical ecosystem responses to environmental change. For example, regarding biodiversity shifts under altered conditions, GLORIA Andes studies showed increased diversity in subalpine summits but decreased plant cover, specifically in alpine mountain tops (Cuesta et al., 2023). Meanwhile, warming studies in high-elevation ecosystems in Ecuador showed reduced species richness and a tendency toward tussock-dominated landscapes (Duchicela et al., 2021). In the Colombian alpine, warming increased grass and shrub cover in lower elevation sites and mosses and lichens at higher elevations (Lasso et al., 2021). Finally, warming experiments in Nariño, Colombia, observed that species in disturbed areas demonstrated a reduced physiological response to warming, suggesting that past disturbances limit their ability to adapt (Solarte et al., 2022). These results show that merging the GLORIA and IPPEX approaches is vital in unraveling the effects of climate change, where its effects can be site-specific and dependent on local conditions and where long-term monitoring matters.


Scope: This symposium will focus on field warming experiments and long-term vegetation dynamics studies in Neotropical mountains within the GLORIA Andes and IPPEX networks. The confluence of these networks will provide two crucial viewpoints: one where the effect of time has been shortened by manipulating environmental variables and the other where ecosystems have changed alongside naturally changing conditions. 


Goals: With this symposium, we aim to share the findings of experiments and long-term plots installed in Neotropical mountains—the oldest installed since 2008—to understand how vegetation communities and ecosystems will be shaped by climate change. 


Objectives: 
1. To strengthen collaboration between two international data-sharing groups, IPPEX and GLORIA.
2. To expand the current extent of our networks to new sites that have incorporated these same methodologies and to share lessons learned from the different experiments and observational studies.