The transition zone where the Andean mountain range meets the Amazon basin constitutes one of the most biologically diverse, complex, and environmentally sensitive regions on Earth. In this ecological corridor, alterations in temperature and precipitation regimes threaten not only endemic biodiversity and critical watersheds, but also rural livelihoods that depend directly on ecosystem stability.
To project these future dynamics and provide spatially explicit climate data, an international research team featuring the participation of Eduardo Álava, faculty member and researcher from the Faculty of Life Sciences (FCV) at ESPOL, published the research paper titled “Spatial Patterns of CMIP6-Projected Climate Change Across Andean–Amazonian Ecoregions of Northeastern Peru” in MDPI’s journal Land.
Next-Generation Climate Modeling: Projecting Future Decades
The study evaluated climate projections across the Amazonas department in northeastern Peru—a representative Andean–Amazonian transition zone—using a multi-model ensemble of five global climate models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6), downscaled via NASA's high-resolution NEX-GDDP-CMIP6 dataset.
The team evaluated two Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP2-4.5 for intermediate emissions and SSP5-8.5 for high emissions) across two continuous future horizons: 2031–2060 and 2071–2100, benchmarking them against a historical reference period (1985–2014).
Key Ecoregional Insights
By simultaneously analyzing mean air temperature, accumulated annual precipitation, and incoming shortwave solar radiation, the researchers identified distinct spatial patterns across ecoregions:
- Widespread Warming: Climate models showed strong directional agreement on sustained regional warming, projecting mean annual temperature increases ranging between 1.20 °C and 3.96 °C.
- Precipitation Heterogeneity: Annual rainfall showed projected increases between 3.93% and 16.59%, with the highest relative increments projected in high-altitude montane grasslands and shrublands, indicating potential shifts in headwater hydrological dynamics.
- Solar Radiation Shifts: Incident solar radiation exhibited moderate increases of up to 2.07 W/m² toward the end of the century, modulated by elevation gradients and cloud-cover regimes across contrasting forest ecosystems.
These findings highlight that climate impacts do not unfold uniformly across complex mountain and lowland landscapes. Spatially explicit ecoregional projections provide essential evidence for territorial planners, conservation practitioners, and policymakers to design targeted landscape restoration strategies, safeguard ecosystem resilience, and buffer rural communities against impending climate shifts.
