Protection Status and Encroachment Pressure on Peru's Ramsar Wetlands and High Andean Bofedales: A National Geospatial Assessment

Peru's 13 Ramsar Wetlands of International Importance span several orders of magnitude in area, from a large Amazonian fan to a small urban marsh in Lima, alongside a large, mostly non Ramsar estate of high Andean bofedales. Whether Ramsar designation corresponds to formal domestic protection, and how exposed these wetlands are to mining concessions, has not been assessed nationally. We built a reproducible geospatial framework (Python, GeoPandas) consolidating the Ramsar boundary, the national protected area core and buffer zone layers, the complete national mining concession cadastre (48,884 polygons, latest application dated December 2019), and a district level bofedal inventory, all from Peru's own open government geoservices. After deduplicating the source service (20 raw features to 13 sites, 6,892,565 ha total), 8 sites (61.5%) overlap a core protected area unit, but the area weighted figure is far lower, 38.0%, because a single site holding 55.5% of the national Ramsar area has essentially no core protection. Active or pending concessions directly overlap 6 sites (17,372 ha, up to 80.7% of a site) and lie within 10 km of 11, without a significant difference between core protected and other sites (two sided Mann-Whitney p = 0.61, n = 13). A district level bofedal summary (987 records, 19 departments) contrasts Puno, with the largest extent, and Ancash, with the most districts. Site counts overstate national protection relative to area, and core protected status coexists with concession overlap in these layers, although legality and timing cannot be assessed.