. Cloud Forest Agenda. UNEP-WCMC Biodiversity Series 20. Cloud forest agenda Basin abstracted during the dry season and the river drying up completely in many years (Wiesmann et al., 20001. CLOUD FORESTS ARE CONCENTRATIONS OF BIODIVERSITY Cloud forests have very high levels of endemism and are home to many threatened species. On a global scale the importance of cloud forests for biodiversity conservation is demonstrated by the fact that 86 per cent of the cloud forest sites identified in the UNEP-WCMC inventory are found within the Global 200 Priority Forest Ecoregions identified by the World
. Cloud Forest Agenda. UNEP-WCMC Biodiversity Series 20. Cloud forest agenda Basin abstracted during the dry season and the river drying up completely in many years (Wiesmann et al., 20001. CLOUD FORESTS ARE CONCENTRATIONS OF BIODIVERSITY Cloud forests have very high levels of endemism and are home to many threatened species. On a global scale the importance of cloud forests for biodiversity conservation is demonstrated by the fact that 86 per cent of the cloud forest sites identified in the UNEP-WCMC inventory are found within the Global 200 Priority Forest Ecoregions identified by the World Wide Fund for Nature IWWF] (Table A]. The distribution of cloud forests shows an even closer correlation with the Endemic Bird Areas identified by BirdLife International (Table 5). Ten per cent of the world's 2 609 restricted-range bird species (those with a range of less than 50 000 km2] are confined to or mainly found in cloud forests, with a further 315 species (12 percent] found in both cloud forests and other habitats (Long, 1995]. An analysis of all 327 threatened bird species of the Americas found that 38 species ( per cent] are cloud forest species. This concentration of threatened bird species in northern Andean cloud forests is illustrated in Map U. Examples of the exceptional endemism of cloud forests at a national scale are shown by data from Latin America. In Mexico cloud forests cover less than 1 per cent of the country but contain about 12 per cent of the country's 3 000 plant species (Rzedowski, 1996]. Up to 30 per cent of these are endemic to the country. Young and Leon (CPD, 1997] estimate that the eastern Peruvian Andean forest harbours 14 per cent of Peru's flora in 5 per cent of the country's area. Similarly, Balslev (1988] estimates that half of Ecuador's species occur in the 10 per cent of the country represented by middle-elevation (900-3 000 m] Andean forests, and 39 per cent of these species are endemic to Ecuador, compared with 16 per cent of lowl
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