Land-change dynamics and ecosystem service trends across the central high-Andean Puna

Mountain landscapes provide multiple ecosystem services that are continually vulnerable to land-change. These complex variations over space and time need to be clustered and explained to develop efficient and sustainable land management processes. We completed a spatiotemporal analysis that describes how different patterns of 6 land-change dynamics impact on the supply of 7 ecosystem services over a period of 13 years and across 25 provinces in the central high-Andean Puna of Peru. The appraisal describes: (1) how clusters of land-change dynamics are linked to ecosystem service bundles; (2) which are the dominant land-change dynamics that influence changes in ecosystem service bundles and (3) how multiple ecosystem service provision and relationships vary over space and time. Our analysis addressed agricultural intensification, agricultural de-intensification, natural processes and deforestation as the most critical land-change dynamics across the central high-Andean region over time. Our results show that most of the provinces were mainly described by a small set of land-change dynamics that configured four types of ecosystem service bundles. Moreover, our study demonstrated that different patterns of land-change dynamics can have the same influence on the ecosystem service bundle development, and transformation of large areas are not necessarily equivalent to high variations in ecosystem service supply. Overall, this study provides an approach to facilitate the incorporation of ES at multiple scales allowing an easy interpretation of the region development that can contribute to land management actions and policy decisions.