Seeing the wood despite the trees: exploring the impact of human disturbance on plant diversity, community structure, and standing biomass in fragmented high Andean forests

High Andean forests harbor a remarkably high biodiversity and play a key role in providing vital ecosystem services for neighboring cities and settlements. However, they are among the most fragmented and threatened ecosystems in the neotropics. To preserve their unique biodiversity, a deeper understanding of the effects of anthropogenic perturbations on them is urgently needed. Here, we characterized the plant communities of high Andean forest remnants in the hinterland of Bogotá in 32 0.04 ha plots. We assessed the woody vegetation, and the understory and epiphytic cover were sampled. We gathered data on compositional and structural parameters and compiled a broad array of variables related to anthropogenic disturbance, ranging from local to landscape-wide metrics. We also assessed phylogenetic diversity and functional diversity. We employed non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) to select meaningful variables in a first step of the analysis. Then we performed partial redundancy an...