Proyecto ALTA

Altitudinal Transects across the Americas

We envision a world where monitoring biodiversity is easy and inexpensive.

We strive to 1) develop and deploy low-cost solutions for biodiversity monitoring, 2) track mountain biodiversity at local to continental scales; and 3) build strategies for inclusive outreach, participation, and engagement. 

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ALTA - Reenvisioning collaboration and biodiversity monitoring

Mountains are cradles of biodiversity and provide drinking water to 60% of human populations. And yet mountain ecosystems are experiencing rapid and irreversible changes due to climate and land-use change. Distributed and coordinated long-term mountain biodiversity monitoring programs provide crucial baseline data for:

  • tracking species migrations,

  • studying climate adaptation, and

  • modeling vulnerabilities (from individual species to entire ecosystems).

To be most effective, broadly adopted, and sustainable, biodiversity monitoring should be inexpensive and open to all.

Therefore, in order to enhance the cost-effectiveness and sustainability of mountain biodiversity monitoring, ALTA will:

  1. share science and technology

  2. adhere to principles of open science

  3. value and welcome local knowledge holders

  4. facilitate the expansion of the monitoring network by locally-led groups

We are just starting out and need movers and shakers to help us build ALTA. See below for our current list of ALTA sites and contact us! Check out our new ALTA Story Map here.

ALTA sites

  • Area de Conservación Guanacaste, Costa Rica

    ACG encompasses lowland tropical dry forests to montane wet forests and ancient volcanoes topped with cloud forests. Our transects span from the Pacific coast to the Caribbean coast. At this site, we are especially interested in the ecotone between tropical dry and wet forests, truly mar a monte. Some of the questions we are asking include: are dry forest species expanding their ranges into higher elevation wet forests?

    We are uninvited guests working on the ancestral lands and unceded territories of the Bostos, Rama, and Chorotega Peoples. We honor the past, present and future land stewards of this region.

  • Puerto Rico

    Puerto Rico is located within the Caribbean Biodiversity Hotspot, one of the ‘hottest’ hotspots on Earth, in part due to the great topographical complexity in such a small area. Here, our sites span tropical dry forests to rain and cloud forests and provide natural gradients for disentangling interactions between climatic and edaphic factors on plant form and function.

    Puerto Rico is the ancestral and unceded territory of the Taíno People. We are uninvited guests and grateful for the privilege to study the flora and fauna here.

  • Great Smoky National Park

    Great Smoky National Park is one of the most biodiverse regions in the U.S. Old growth deciduous forests in the lowlands give way to coniferous forests across a series of NEON sites. We are especially interested in adult and seedling plant functional traits as indices of shifting species interactions and future forest composition.

    This land is the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the ᏣᎳᎫᏪᏘᏱ Tsalaguwetiyi (Cherokee, East) and S’atsoyaha (Yuchi) Peoples. Our presence is uninvited.

  • Wintergreen, VA

    Wintergreen is our ‘local’ field site, located an hour and change from Richmond, VA and a gateway to the Appalachian Mountains. Here, we are testing hypotheses related to differentiation of woody and herbaceous plant traits.

    We work as uninvited guests on land that is the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Monacan People.

  • Join ALTA

    Please contact us about ways we can work together.