Land Use Affects the Local Climate of a Tropical Mountain Landscape in Northern Ecuador

Changes in land use affect biodiversity and the biophysical structure of ecosystems, causing negative impacts on ecosystem services, such as climate regulation. However, few studies have evaluated the effect of land use changes on the local climate, particularly in tropical mountain systems such as the Andes. Therefore, this study compares 4 land use types (native forest, planted forest, maize monoculture, and pasture) in a mountain landscape in northern Ecuador as a proxy to assess the impact of land use change on local climate regulation. We estimated gap fraction with photographic techniques and recorded temperature and relative humidity using dataloggers set at 2 heights (0 m and 1 m) above ground level across the land use types. As we expected, native forests provided a more stable microclimate, demonstrating significantly lower temperatures and higher relative humidity values than the other land use types. This effect on microclimate was significantly explained with highest temperatures at intermediate gap fraction levels. In addition, we observed that native forests provided a buffer effect for the variations in mesoclimate; only native forests showed an evident reduction in local temperature over the range of mesoclimates. Local temperature variations registered in human-altered systems (planted forests and pastures) were significantly explained by the mesoclimate variation, with the exception of monocultures that exhibited a mismatch between the 2 scales of climate. These results highlight the importance of native forest for microclimate regulation, an ecosystem service that can act synergistically with other biodiversity and conservation goals to sustainably manage landscapes in Andean mountain systems.