Data set: Land use and land cover change in a tropical mountain landscape of northern Ecuador: altitudinal patterns and driving forces

Tropical mountain ecosystems are threatened by land use pressures, compromising their capacity to provide multiple ecosystem services. The analysis of landscape changes and their proximate driving forces is often qualitative and sectorial oriented, although local patterns and numerous interactions among socio-economic, demographic, and biophysical factors shape these socio-ecological systems. We characterized land use land cover (LULC) dynamics using Markov-chain probabilities by elevation and geographic settings and then, implementing the DPSIR holistic approach, we integrated them with a variety of freely available geospatial and temporal data into a Generalized Additive Model (GAM) to uncover the factors driving such landscape dynamics in a sensitive region of the northern Ecuadorian Andes. Our results demonstrated a dynamic and clear geographical pattern of distinct LULC transitions through time, explained by different combination of socio-economic factors, demographic and infrastructure variables and environmental parameters, from which topographic variables were the main drivers of change in this landscape. We found that deforestation of remnant native forest and agricultural expansion still occur in higher elevations, while land conversion toward anthropic environments, particularly significant expansion of floriculture and urban areas were observed in lower elevations to the east of the studied territory. Our findings also revealed an unexpected stability trend of paramo and a successional recovery of previous agricultural land to the west and center of the territory, which could be explained by agricultural land abandonment. However, the very low probability of persistence of montane forests found overall, highlights the greater threat to permanently lose the already vulnerable mountain native biodiversity. The methodological approach and our findings, demonstrating dynamic patterns through space and time and their explanatory drivers, could help local authorities and stakeholder to improve sustainably resource land management in vulnerable landscapes such as the tropical Andes in northern Ecuador.