Resumen

MENESES, Rosa I. et al. Methods to quantify the diversity and the productivity of high-Andean wetlands under the effects of climate change. Ecología en Bolivia [online]. 2014, vol.49, n.3, pp.42-55. ISSN 1605-2528.

The diversity and the productivity of high Andean wetlands (hereafter termed bofedales) are expected to be negatively impacted by the rapid glacial recession following the effects of recent and upcoming climate change, impacting their area and their elevational distribution. Accordingly, a topical conservation challenge is to understand the organization and the functioning of these ecosystems in the face of global warming. We present a series of methods designed to examine the responses of plant communities of high-Andean bofedales to climate change, with a specific attention to the variables area and elevation of bofedales. Using 200 plots 1 m² in size distributed across a regional sampling, we propose to conduct biotic measurements related to species richness and relative cover of plants, but also leaf dry mass content (LDMC), in order to estimate the productivity of the community. Moreover, we describe abiotic measurements such as physico-chemical parameters (pH, water conductivity, soil and water nutrients), which may help to infer variations in the productivity and the diversity of plant communities. Because the bofedales are dominated by a few cushion-forming species, we describe also methods to characterize cushion variation at inter- and intra- specific levels. All the methods discussed are of high practicability for non-specialists in order to optimize the time spent in the field. We finally discuss the relevance of each method described with the help of preliminary results, and comparing them with methods available in the literature.

Palabras clave : Cushion plants; Foundation species; High-Andean cushion bogs; LDMC; SLA.

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