Although tropical mountain ecosystems, such as montane forests, are home to great biodiversity and offer crucial ecosystem services including water supply and participation in temperature control and regional and global climate, they are comparatively understudied. The amount of information on mountain vegetation and its dynamics that is currently accessible is far insufficient to accurately model how it will interact with the environment as a result of climate change.
Researchers from institutions in Brazil, many other South American nations, and the UK have released a paper in the journal Plant Ecology & Diversity that sheds light on these issues. The authors of the article contend that establishing "a transdisciplinary network" capable of researching the natural dynamics of mountain ecosystems and their reactions to global change drivers locally, regionally, and across the continent within the framework of a socio-ecological system would be an effective way to close this gap.
"The results of our research show that very little information of the kind needed to model mountain clusters in South America is available. We need more specific data to do this modeling, especially if we want to include socio-ecological diversity. We advocate the creation of a network of sites representing the heterogeneity of social and ecological conditions in montain ecosystems with the aim of quantifying the hitherto neglected role of these ecosystems in carbon and water cycling, as well as other ecosystem services," Laszlo Karoly Nagy, first author of the article, told.