Tropical Montane Cloud Forests

The spatial distribution of TMCFs has been explored by several authors (Aldrich et al., 1997a; Helmer et al., 2019; Los et al., 2021; Wilson and Jetz, 2016). However, there is no consensus on zoning or delimiting its global distribution. The United Nations Environment Programme - World Conservation Monitoring Center (UNEP-WCMC) efforts have helped identify 529 TMCFs distributed worldwide (Aldrich et al., 1997a). These TMCFs were identified by a global directory of experts that described main sub-national cloud forest regions and sites along with their latitude and longitude (details in Aldrich et al., 1997b). Here, we used these TMCFs to select and extract climatic trends associated with these ecosystems (Section 2.3 ). Similarly, to evaluate how climatic trends are affected by the spatial distribution of these ecosystems, we classified these TMCFs according to their distribution into biogeographic realms using Dinerstein et al. (2017) layers. This helped us differentiate TMCFs within five macro-ecological locations: Neotropical (n = 254), Palearctic (n = 90), Indomalayan (n = 119), Australasia (n = 57), and Oceania (n =1). Eight sites defined by UNEP-WCMC were excluded, given their inconsistency in their location (Table S1). In addition, we used a mask of tropical landmasses to compare how trends in low CF at TMCFs differed from those in other tropical regions. We considered tropical landmasses as areas between the Tropic of Capricorn and Cancer that fall within country polygons obtained from Natural Earth (www.naturalearthdata.com). We used also country boundaries from Natural Earth to visualize CF trends among nations.