Road Disturbance Shifts Root Fungal Symbiont Types and Reduces the Connectivity of Plant-Fungal Co-Occurrence Networks in Mountains.

Roads are currently one of the most disruptive anthropogenic disturbances to mountain ecosystems worldwide. These disturbances can have a profound effect on roadside soil properties and vegetation, typically favouring fast-growing and ruderal species. However, their effect on plant-associated fungal communities and plant-fungal interactions remains largely unknown.

Rapid upwards spread of non-native plants in mountains across continents.

High-elevation ecosystems are among the few ecosystems worldwide that are not yet heavily invaded by non-native plants. This is expected to change as species expand their range limits upwards to fill their climatic niches and respond to ongoing anthropogenic disturbances. Yet, whether and how quickly these changes are happening has only been assessed in a few isolated cases.

Understanding climate change impacts on biome and plant distributions in the Andes: Challenges and opportunities.

Aim: Climate change is expected to impact mountain biodiversity by shifting species ranges and the biomes they shape. The extent and regional variation in these impacts are still poorly understood, particularly in the highly biodiverse Andes. Regional syntheses of climate change impacts on vegetation are pivotal to identify and guide research priorities.

Going off trails: How dispersed visitor use affects alpine vegetation.

Mountain protected areas provide a range of ecosystem services including conserving biodiversity, while often providing recreation and tourism opportunities. Unfortunately, tourists and pack animals used to transport equipment can damage sensitive alpine vegetation particularly when they leave trails. This study assessed the impacts of disturbance from off trail use on alpine vegetation in a popular park in the Andes.

SoilTemp: A global database of near-surface temperature.

Current analyses and predictions of spatially explicit patterns and processes in ecology most often rely on climate data interpolated from standardized weather stations. This interpolated climate data represents long-term average thermal conditions at coarse spatial resolutions only. Hence, many climate-forcing factors that operate at fine spatiotemporal resolutions are overlooked.

Using social media images to assess ecosystem services in a remote protected area in the Argentinean Andes.

Social media images are a novel source of data to assess how people view and value the environment. Access to these images is often free, the volume and spread of images is expanding rapidly and hence they are an increasingly valuable source of data complementing and expanding on other data. Recently, coding images has been used to assess sociocultural values relating to ecosystem services including those provided by national parks.

Using crowd-sourced photos to assess seasonal patterns of visitor use in mountain-protected areas.

Managing protected areas effectively requires information about patterns of visitor use, but these data are often limited. We explore how geotagged photos on Flickr, a popular photo-sharing social-media site, can generate hotspot maps and distribution models of temporal and spatial patterns of use in two mountain-protected areas of high conservation value. In Aconcagua Provincial Park (Argentina), two routes to the summit of Aconcagua were used in summer, but most visitors stayed close to the main road, using formal and informal walking trails and the Visitor Centre, while in winter, there was very limited visitation.

How Networks of Informal Trails Cause Landscape Level Damage to Vegetation.

When visitors are not constrained to remain on formal trails, informal trail networks can develop and damage plant communities in protected areas. These networks can form in areas with low growing vegetation, where formal trails are limited, where there is limited regulation and where vegetation is slow to recover once disturbed. To demonstrate the extent of impacts from unregulated recreational use, we assessed damage to alpine vegetation by hikers and pack animals in the highest protected area in the southern Hemisphere: Aconcagua Park, in the Andes.

Using functional traits to assess the resistance of subalpine grassland to trampling by mountain biking and hiking.

Functional traits reflect plant responses to disturbance, including from visitor impacts. The impacts of mountain biking and hiking on functional composition were compared using a common experimental protocol in a subalpine grassland in the Australian Alps. The overlapping cover of all species was recorded two weeks after different intensities of hiking (200 and 500 passes) and mountain biking (none, 25, 75, 200 and 500 passes).

Desktop analysis of potential impacts of visitor use: a case study for the highest park in the Southern Hemisphere.

Nature-based tourism and recreation activities have a range of environmental impacts, but most protected area agencies have limited capacity to assess them. To prioritise where and what impacts to monitor and manage, we conducted a desktop assessment using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) by combining recreation ecology research with data on visitor usage and key environmental features for a popular protected area used for mountaineering and trekking, Aconcagua Provincial Park (2400-6962 m a.s.

Is tourism damaging ecosystems in the Andes? Current knowledge and an agenda for future research.

Despite the popularity of tourism and recreation in the Andes in South America and the regions conservation value, there is limited research on the ecological impacts of these types of anthropogenic use. Using a systematic quantitative literature review method, we found 47 recreation ecology studies from the Andes, 25 of which used an experimental design. Most of these were from the Southern Andes in Argentina (13 studies) or Chile (eight studies) with only four studies from the Northern Andes.

Impacts of informal trails on vegetation and soils in the highest protected area in the Southern Hemisphere.

There is limited recreation ecology research in South America, especially studies looking at informal trails. Impacts of informal trails formed by hikers and pack animals on vegetation and soils were assessed for the highest protected area in the Southern Hemisphere, Aconcagua Provincial Park. The number of braided trails, their width and depth were surveyed at 30 sites along the main access route to Mt Aconcagua (6962 m a.

Assessing the impacts of mountain biking and hiking on subalpine grassland in Australia using an experimental protocol.

Mountain biking is an increasingly popular, but sometimes controversial, activity in protected areas. Limited research on its impacts, including studies comparing biking with hiking, contributes to the challenges for mangers in assessing its appropriateness. The impacts of mountain bike riding off trail were compared to those of hiking on subalpine grassland in Australia using a modification of a common trampling experimental methodology.