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Climate and vegetation of the Eastern Cordillera

by Nina Brunnbauer, Carina Kozmich, Andreas Kropf, and Hannah Perlinger

Map

How a cactus could fall in love with the flower of an orchid: a transect through the Eastern Cordillera.

General information

The Eastern Cordillera is the easternmost range of the Andes of northwestern Argentina. The transect considered here crosses this mountain range at approx. 27 degrees Southern latitude and is therefore located in an area influenced by the trade winds. They lead to some interesting effects with regard to climate and vegetation when hitting the Eastern Cordillera. The corresponding spatial gradients and transitions can be observed best along the road from Amaicha del Valle across the Paso del Infernillo and Tafí del Valle down to the eastern forelands, or the other way round.

Click on one of the red symbols to proceed to the corresponding point of interest.

Exercise

From which direction do the trade winds blow? Click into the profile graph to see the answer.

A nice video explaining the trade winds is provided by TheSimpleGeography. Do you already know something about the effects of the trade winds along the Pacific coast? If not, you can learn more by visiting the contribution on the coastal desert and the Christ Child!

Video

A racy drive across the Eastern Cordillera

Click on the arrow to start the time-lapse movie. Describe what you can see in this movie. How does the landscape change? What can you recognize at the beginning, and what at the end? From your findings and the profile graph, derive the travel direction of the bus:

From northwest to southeast

From southeast to northwest

Camera: Claudia Blauensteiner | Editing: Thomas Lohr

Exercise

Vegetation zones of the Eastern Cordillera

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Assign each of the photographs to those points in the map, where you think that the corresponding vegetation can occur. Thereby, consider particularly the climatic conditions (elevation, influence of the tradewinds) which could influence the vegetation.

Here you can see a semi-desert with small shrubs and columnar cacti of the species Echinopsis terscheckii.

Grab the image at the upper left symbol and drag the symbol into the corresponding circle in the map.

Visualization of terrain derived from SRTM V4 data. Points and road mapped from OpenStreetMap.

Graphics

3D view of the Eastern Cordillera

With this 3D view you can observe the landscape from various perspectives. Use the left mouse key to rotate, the mouse wheel to zoom, and the right mouse key to drag the scene.

This view makes clear again the large difference between the humid eastern slopes and the arid western slopes of the Eastern Cordillera.

This scene was generated with the QGIS plugin Qgis2threejs and uses the following libraries: three.js http://threejs.org/ (LICENSE) and Proj4js http://trac.osgeo.org/proj4js/ (LICENSE). Background: Bing Aerial.

References and links

Schultz, J. (2016): Die Ökozonen der Erde. Stuttgart: Verlag Eugen Ulmer KG

This contribution was slightly revised, extended, and translated from German by Martin Mergili.