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, there are few studies that evaluate the effect of land use changes on the local climate, particularly in tropical mountain systems like the Andes. Therefore, this study compares four 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 two 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 on the variations in mesoclimate; only in this land use type there was an evident reduction in local temperature over the range of mesoclimate; whereas local temperature variations registered on 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 two scales of climate. These results highlight the importance of native forest for microclimate regulation, an ecosystem service which can act synergistically with other biodiversity other conservation goals to sustainably manage landscapes in Andean mountain systems.