High mountain wetlands (bofedales) are vital to the local environment of the Andes, acting as key water and carbon reservoirs, biodiversity hotspots, and cultural landmarks for indigenous and local communities. Knowledge on their spatial and temporal dynamics can help us to better understand hydrological processes in high-mountain regions, where crucial water balance parameters such as water retention and baseflow contributions to runoff are highly complex and often poorly constrained.
Here we show the results from a remote sensing based, high resolution wetland mapping approach combined with in situ measurements from a network of wetland water level sensors in selected study catchments, that reveals the seasonal dynamics of high Andean wetlands, from 2019 until today. We focus on understanding the influence of glacier melt upon seasonal storage within wetlands, by quantifying their spatial-temporal behaviour in relation to their distance from glaciers. We note that this is likely to change in the near-future, given the severity of climate change impacts on glacier recession and catchment hydrology, which makes a timely assessment of these dynamics even more important. Additionally, we assess wetland dynamics across different Andean latitudes, to explore how hydrological and climatic factors shape the spatial-temporal behaviour of wetlands.
We show that the information on wetland variability derived from our high-resolution wetland map can help to better understand the complex hydrological dynamics in mountain regions. Particularly the seasonal variation in wetland extents shows clear differences in dry vs. wet periods, which reveals changing compositions of hydrological fluxes (i.e. changing dominance of groundwater, glacier and snow melt, or precipitation). Our dynamic high mountain wetland map can thus help to improve our understanding of water retention and baseflow contributions, and how they may change under future climate conditions.