In the tropical Andes, uncontrolled urban growth and the loss of agricultural land severely affect periurban smallholders who depend on the lease of farmland. In this context, the hinterland of Huancayo, Peru, represents a case in point, given that the urbanization of irrigated land resources on the valley floor endangers agricultural production during the dry season and thus forces agriculturalists to adapt their land use—a problem largely attributed to policy failures. If smallholder farmers had been policy-makers in the past, what type of urban growth would have taken place? Which future settlement structure would they prefer? To answer these questions, an easy-to-use and practice-oriented method for visualizing smallholder views on urbanization and landscape change was developed and tested. A combination of photomontage-based visualization exercises and interviews revealed that the interviewees mostly agreed that agricultural areas should remain between a mix of low and high buildings along the existing road. Hence, to a certain degree, their perception toward dispersed urban development seems not to be as negative as one could suppose. Additionally, some peasants argue that urban expansion should be on the steep and nonirrigated slopes adjacent to the city in order to conserve the fertile and irrigated land on the valley floor. Finally, the results of this study point to the potential of landscape visualizations for enabling mountain smallholders to participate in periurban land use planning and lead to the conclusion that photomontages, visualization exercises, and interviews should increasingly be used to improve understanding of smallholders' views, for this method includes an important emotional component that is rarely considered by planners and policy-makers.

One way of preserving the natural and cultural diversity of mountain areas and supporting their sustainable development is the establishment of protected areas. The scientific literature acknowledges the importance of participation by local stakeholders and of considering social cohesion in protected area management. Intergenerational practice has been shown to enhance participation and improve social cohesion; however, its potential role in natural resource management has not been considered by the research community. This paper explores the potential for integrating intergenerational practice into protected area management in mountainous regions, guided by 3 research questions: What challenges of protected area management could benefit from intergenerational practice? How can intergenerational practice help to address these challenges? And how could intergenerational practice be more strongly integrated into current protected area management? The paper focuses on selected management challenges, mostly related to the development function of protected areas, and suggests intergenerational practice solution pathways for each challenge, derived from qualitative content analysis of the literature, interviews with protected area and regional development experts, and participation in the project Big Foot: Crossing Generations, Crossing Mountains, which tested intergenerational learning approaches in 3 rural municipalities—one each in Bulgaria, Greece, and Italy. Recommendations are proposed for integrating intergenerational practice into protected area management policy and practice at the global, regional, and local levels.

Researchers and development practitioners in remote mountain areas rely on elevation data to study vegetation dynamics, natural hazards, land use, and other patterns. However, despite advances in technology, accurate digital elevation models (DEMs) with spatial resolution <30 m do not exist for most of the world's montane regions. We used a low-cost GPS-based protocol to construct a high-resolution (10 m) DEM for a rugged, remote mountain site in the northern Peruvian Andes. Elevation data were collected with handheld GPS units and combined with digitized and interpolated points within a Geographic Information System to generate a 10 m DEM. Additional DEMs were generated using 50%, 20%, and 15% of the surface points collected and from a 1∶100,000 topographic map and ASTER GDEMv2 data. Estimated absolute vertical accuracy of the GPS surface-point DEMs was significantly lower than that of the ASTER GDEMv2 and topographic map DEMs. Relative vertical accuracy, a better measure of DEM quality, was considerably lower for all 6 DEMs than absolute vertical accuracy. Depending on project budget, time, and labor availability, this method can be used to produce DEMs with high spatial resolution and substantially improved relief maps for research, visualization, and communication purposes. Implementation of this method is practical in locations without access to electricity or post-processing correction facilities, open-canopy land covers, and projects with small budgets that involve local participants.

Malta orange (Citrus sinensis) is an important cash crop in the mountain state of Uttarakhand, India. Smallholder farmers growing it face multiple challenges due to unorganized and inaccessible markets; they are forced to sell to intermediaries at very low prices. In response, the government of Uttarakhand introduced a minimum support price for Malta oranges; however, this failed to address farmers' problems due to poor implementation. This paper presents the results of an action research project with farmers in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand to develop farmers' resilience by upgrading their position in the Malta orange value chain, targeting production, processing, and marketing through community-based enterprise development. Information was collected before and after the intervention by various means, including stakeholder meetings, focus group discussions, and interviews with farmers and value chain facilitators. Activities supported by the research have contributed to increased productivity and farmer incomes. Farmers became better organized, and their bargaining power improved considerably. The enterprise-based upgrading process brought about an inclusive and pro-poor Malta orange value chain system with improved terms of engagement for smallholder farmers. The research results show that policy change, improved provision of technical and financial services, establishment of common facility centers, and strengthening of farmers' institutions are imperative to enable smallholder farmers to engage in value chains and thus increase their resilience.

The maintenance of family farms in mountain areas constitutes a serious challenge in the context of globalization. European mountain agriculture faces significant natural constraints and cannot follow the same development path as agriculture in the plains. The study reported here sought to analyze recent changes in mountain family dairy farming in the Vercors (Alpine uplands with urban and tourism development) and characterize the diversity of family farm development trajectories. We developed an analytical framework that allowed us, based on individual data from the National Census of Agriculture for 1988, 2000, and 2010 and semistructured interviews in farms, to capture and analyze patterns of change on family dairy farms between 2000 and 2010 and to link changes in farming systems and farming family organizations. Our results show a drop in the number of dairy farms and changes to their organization. This article discusses the different strategies adopted by dairy families, which are based on different adaptive resources.

Families living on transhumance farms (Stufenbetriebe) in the Swiss Alps may move with their cattle up to 12 times a year between as many as 4 altitudinal levels. Transhumance farms have come under increasing political pressure to improve their economic performance, which has been hampered by a number of factors, such as rising infrastructure costs for meeting animal welfare regulations at multiple farm locations, lack of access roads, and restrictions on the creation of new transhumance farms. Little is known about transhumant farming practices and the role they play in mountain regions. In this exploratory anthropological study, we interviewed 39 transhumance farm family members in 7 Swiss cantons about their history, present situation, and visions of the future. A special focus was the risk perceptions upon which decisions and management strategies are based. The semistructured interviews were analyzed according to principles of content analysis and risk network analysis, with a focus on social, cultural, economic, and political risks as well as natural hazards. The results show that many transhumance farms are undergoing a process of adaptation to a changing social, political, economic, environmental, and cultural context. Transhumance farming has allowed individuals to survive as mountain farmers despite often difficult conditions. This study offers important insights into the risk perceptions and strategies of adaptation to ongoing changes developed by the families on these farms.

Climate changes are having dramatic ecological impacts in mid- to high-latitude mountain ranges where growth conditions are limited by climatic variables such as duration of growing season, moisture, and ambient temperature. We document patterns of forest vegetative response for 5 major alpine forest communities to current climate variability in the central Himalayas of Nepal to provide a baseline for assessment of future changes, as well as offer some insight into the trajectory of these changes over time. We used mean monthly surface air temperature and rainfall and the monthly averaged normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) to compare relative vegetation productivity among forest types and in relation to both climatic variables. Because changes in temperature and precipitation are directly manifested as changes in phenology, we examined current vegetative responses to climate variability in an effort to determine which climate variable is most critical for different alpine forest types. Our results show that correlations differ according to vegetation type and confirm that both precipitation and temperature affect monthly NDVI values, though more significant correlations were found with temperature data. The temperature response was more consistent because at the maximum increased temperatures, there was still an ongoing increase in vegetative vigor. This indicates that temperature is still the major limiting factor for plant growth at higher-elevation sites. This part of the Himalayas has abundant moisture, and some forest types are already saturated in terms of growth in relation to precipitation. Clear increases in productivity are documented on the upper treeline ecotones, and these systems are likely to continue to have increasing growth rates.

The Tibetan Plateau is of fundamental ecological significance to China, Asia, and the world. In recent years, Tibetan grasslands have suffered from severe degradation due to climate change and anthropogenic disturbance. In this study, nitrogen (N) and phosphate were applied to a moderately degraded Kobresia pygmaea meadow and Stipa purpurea steppe in the arid alpine northern Tibetan Plateau. The results showed that with increasing nitrogenous fertilizer, the height, coverage, biomass, and importance value of the K. pygmaea population decreased whereas the population of S. purpurea exhibited the opposite trend. Application of a mixed fertilizer with the same amount of N and phosphorus (P) (5 g each per m²) doubled the biomass of the K. pygmaea meadow and increased the aboveground biomass of the S. purpurea steppe by 72.3%. The nitrogenous fertilizer increased the total biomass and belowground biomass of the S. purpurea steppe, whereas the mixed fertilizer was beneficial to aboveground grass recovery. Application of 10 g N 5 g P m⁻² fertilizer increased aboveground biomass by 164.8%, whereas the belowground biomass was less than the control by 4.7%. The N and P fertilizer did not affect soil pH, except for some changes in soil N and P contents.

Big data. For some, it is a vaguely apocalyptic term; for others, it represents a new era of understanding our environment and ourselves. Today, big data are being harnessed in ever more innovative ways that simply were not possible when we only had small sets of data to work with. Although mountain system research does not yet produce the vast quantities of data that are now common to other fields, there are nevertheless many data that, if pooled, could provide new insights into how mountain socioecological systems function. As the Mountain Research Initiative's Concerted Efforts progress, it becomes clear that it is time for the mountain research community to harness the lessons and power of at least “medium data” to develop a stronger, evidence-based understanding of both the generalities and the specificities of mountain systems.

Effective governance of natural resources requires robust information about a diverse set of social and ecological dynamics. CONDESAN (the Consorcio para el Desarrollo Sostenible de la Ecorregión Andina) is making progress in the Andean region to generate, manage, and mobilize knowledge about key social, economic, and environmental processes and to make them available to actors who most need it for decision-making. The approaches integrate tools at multiple scales, emphasizing the diverse nature of the drivers and impacts of environmental change and promoting long-term monitoring within collaborative networks. True integration of social and environmental observation platforms is still a challenge, but current progress and future initiatives will allow CONDESAN to generate sound alternatives for the Andes.