The Paramo and Andean Highland Ecosystems

The páramo is a neotropical alpine biome found roughly between 3,000 and 4,500 meters across the northern Andes of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and northernmost Peru, occupying the belt between the upper treeline and the permanent snowline. Botanist James Luteyn's Páramos: A Checklist of Plant Diversity, Geographical Distribution, and Botanical Literature (1999) remains a standard reference for the biome's flora. A 2013 study by Santiago Madriñán and colleagues, published in Frontiers in Genetics, described the páramo as one of the fastest-diversifying biomes on Earth, its plant lineages having radiated explosively only since the biome's formation following the uplift and glacial retreat of the northern Andes in the last few million years.