Páramos, jalcas, and cloud forests in Peruvian Northern

By Fidel Torres G.

 

A key environmental element and part of the world agenda that has received most attention in the context of climate change is the water and the ecosystems producing it. There’s no country nor región projecting its competitiveness future without a strategic forecast of water availability and management, as it’s neither possible to count the biodiversity as a comparative advantage ignoring what is really haven about it.

 

Countries like Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador have aadvanced programmes of páramo ecosystem research. According to Dr Conrado Tobón, in Colombia, the soil-plant complex of the páramos counts with special physical capabilities for keeping and distributing water.

 

Each gram of moss-soil has the retentive capability of 8 grams of water. The hydric performance of this ecosystem is 65%. In other words, it supplies 65 liters of water to a basin per each 100 received from the atmosphere. While the jungle and dry forests have hydric performances of 35% and 20% each one.

 

Those differences show the importance of the páramos environmental service for the growing activity as well as the health of valleys that receive the water from the páramos in quantity and quality.

 

From the economic perspective, the economist Hugo Fano emphazises the strategic importance of this ecosystem based on the principle that the water management, in its condition of economic good, is an important mean to get an effective, equitative, and sustainable use for the conservation and protection of natural resources that make it available.

 

In the valuation of water, it must be considered that its economic value has, at least, three dimensions to consider. A) It’s differentiated by regions (basins) and periods, b) It varies according to the type of user, and c) It changes through the time, given the offer-demand relation of the resource, the perception, and the social preferences.

 

Botanical experts as Abundio Sagásteguiand Isidoro Sánchez, with National Universities of Trujillo and Cajamarca, sustain with their researchs the difference of the flower composition (species of plants) between the typical páramo ecosystem of Andes of Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, and its analogic one at Peruvian Northern Andes, in Piura and Cajamarca, which vegetal species identify it like jalca [halka] ecosystem with a rising number of endemic plants and animals (or unique for this ecosystem) increasing its economic value if it’s considered the Sánchez’s affirmation that is registered the most abundance of medicinal plants at this environment

 

In his pioneer study, botanic A. Weberbauer A. (1936) points out that the jalca, located over the agriculture limit, represents a formation of transition between the Andean puna of Peruvian Central and Southern and the typical páramo from Ecuador to Venezuela, that begins in Andes of La Libertad to Piura and Cajamarca, sharing biologic links with the páramos of Ecuador, and, the most important, accomplishing the same environmental function – the hydric storage and regulation at basins nascents.

 

Under the jalcas of Ayabaca and Huancabamba, it’s observed the existence of cloud forests, predominating at the basin nascents. According to A. Brack and Plenge (2002), this type of forest is distributed between 4290 and 8250 feet above sea level, and it’s characterized by its persistent humidity and rain. A big quantity of plants cover the trunks and branches of the trees like mooses, ferns, orchids, and wild pineapples (bromeliads) plus climbing plants.

 

They are crossed by numerous stretch cascades and very steep slopes. The tree stratum is not too high but very matted, abounding the ferns like trees until 50 feet height. The Northern páramos are too wet that by sections, and despite the height, are growing in them a moor vegetation as well as almost a forest one, that integrates cloud forests species.

 

The cloud forests represent 2.5% of the diminished tropical jungles of the world (Fen Montaigne, 2004) and its biodiversity is surprising. Compared to the forests of fflat jungle, the cloud forests have been studied a bit, so it’s known relatively few about them. For real, each new inventory adds new species, unexpected facts, or new values or uses.

 

In the new era of bioeconomy, the most economic value of biodiversity is concentrated in gens. Every gen can be valued as genetic bonds in US$ 5 million. Considering the calculation done for Peru, there are approximately 283 million of endemic gens (unique in the world) which if it’s assumed that just 1% to be used, it will have a US$ 14 trillion projected value (M. Gutiérrez, 2008). According to Gutiérrez, in a gens international commerce scenario aand in 5%-annual-interest-rate fix deposit, this could give a revenue of US$ 700 billion per year of interests, what makes this type of riches as irreplaceable by any other else.

 

In the scenario of new economic order that is in progress, defined as biocommerce, the genetic reserves as much as the traditional knowledge on the native organisms and the practices of their use and management, are goods intensely demanded by the biotechnology like one of the intensive sectors in knowledge and continuous expansion of the highly technified countries but lack of biodiversity.

 

© 2008 Fidel Torres Guevara. All Rights Reserved. The photographs featured on this entry are F. Zapata, Gabriela López, Andrés J. Vivas S. and belong to Páramo Andino Project.