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 mining concession cadastre, 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. Mining concession area near sites is low overall (1, 2 and 3 sites affected within 5, 10 and 20 km respectively), with no significant difference between protected and unprotected sites (two sided Mann-Whitney p = 0.29, n = 13). A district level bofedal summary (987 records, 19 departments) shows Puno concentrating the largest extent while Ancash has the most affected districts (125), a fragmented pattern. Counting protected sites overstates national protection relative to an area weighted measure; the Pastaza fan and Lake Titicaca are priority cases for strengthened protection. The framework is reproducible from open government data.