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Seasonal Water Storage and Release Dynamics of Bofedal Wetlands in the Central Andes
(John Wiley and Sons Ltd, 2023-08-01)
Tropical high-Andean wetlands, locally known as ‘bofedales’, are key ecosystems sustaining biodiversity, carbon sequestration, water provision and livestock farming. Bofedales' contribution to dry season baseflows and sustaining water quality is crucial for downstream water security. The sensitivity of bofedales to climatic and anthropogenic disturbances is therefore of growing concern for watershed management. This study aims to understand seasonal water storage and release characteristics of bofedales by combining remote sensing analysis and ground-based monitoring for the wet and dry seasons of late 2019 to early 2021, using the glacierised Vilcanota-Urubamba basin (Southern Peru) as a case study. A network of five ultrasound loggers was installed to obtain discharge and water table data from bofedal sites across two headwater catchments. The seasonal extent of bofedales was mapped by applying a supervised machine learning model using Random Forest on imagery from Sentinel-2 and NASADEM. We identified high seasonal variability in bofedal area with a total of 3.5% and 10.6% of each catchment area, respectively, at the end of the dry season (2020), which increased to 15.1% and 16.9%, respectively, at the end of the following wet season (2021). The hydrological observations and bofedal maps were combined into a hydrological conceptual model to estimate the storage and release characteristics of the bofedales, and their contribution to runoff at the catchment scale. Estimated lag times between 1 and 32 days indicate a prolonged bofedal flow contribution throughout the dry season (about 74% of total flow). Thus, our results suggest that bofedales provide substantial contribution to dry season baseflow, water flow regulation and storage. These findings highlight the importance of including bofedales in local water management strategies and adaptation interventions including nature-based solutions that seek to support long-term water security in seasonally dry and rapidly changing Andean catchments.
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Mapping High-Altitude Peatlands to Inform a Landscape Conservation Strategy in the Andes of Northern Peru
(Cambridge University Press, 2023-12-12)
The wetlands of the jalca ecoregion in the Andes of northern Peru form peat and play a major role in the hydrological ecosystem services of the ecoregion. Although peat is globally valued for carbon sequestration and storage, peatlands have not yet been mapped in the jalca. In this region, the Gocta waterfall, one of the 20 highest waterfalls in the world, depends on the jalca's wetlands ecosystem. The local population depends on tourism to the waterfall and is concerned about preserving its drainage area. To inform conservation planning, in this study we delimited the drainage area of the Gocta waterfall and identified land tenure by applying Geographic Information System (GIS), remote sensing and participatory mapping techniques. Then, by classifying optical, radar and digital elevation models data, we mapped peatland in the jalca of the Gocta drainage area with an overall accuracy of 97.1%. Our results will inform conservation strategy in this complex area of communal, private and informal land tenure systems. At a regional level, this appears to be the first attempt at mapping peatlands using remote sensing imagery in the jalca ecoregion, and it represents a milestone for future efforts to map and conserve peatlands in other tropical mountain areas of the world.
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Landsystems of the tropical high Peruvian Andes: Glaciers, lakes, wetlands and water resources in the Cordillera Vilcanota
(Wiley, 2026-05-01)
The water, food and energy security of millions of people is at risk in several regions of the tropical Andes because climate change is altering water storage in high Andean wetlands ( bofedales ), lakes and glacier ice. These features play a crucial role in delaying water release, particularly in many semiarid regions with pronounced seasonal precipitation, sustaining baseflows and water quality. Changing water availability impacts both high Andean pastoralist systems and other productive systems downstream, including bigger cities in the inter‐Andean valleys. Here we outline the hydrological and geomorphological relationships between glaciers, lakes and bofedal wetlands, and the way in which catchment features such as moraines, talus slopes and sandar interact with catchment hydrology in the tropical Andes of Peru. We present a geomorphological map of catchment features in the Cordillera Vilcanota, Southern Peru, and explore how these features can impact hydrogeological processes. We suggest the ways in which well mapped and dated catchment features can provide a damming or groundwater/surface water exchange mechanism for bofedal development and sustenance. We find that glacial lakes will grow modestly as glaciers retreat, but will not provide an equivalent water storage to compensate for the loss of glacier ice. We find that bofedales are well developed within glacial limits, with glacial processes such as erosion and formation of moraines providing the poorly drained conditions suitable for their development. However, we find that the majority of the bofedales are largely hydrologically independent of contemporary glaciers, and could perhaps buffer water supply as glaciers dwindle and disappear. Such analysis enables an improved understanding of the timeframe for the formation of bofedal wetlands and for them to provide their key ecosystem services of water retention and remediation capacity, buffering drought, providing forage for high‐Andean livestock herding, carbon storing and sequestration.
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