Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A treeless alpine plateau of the tropical Andes.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A desert plain, bare of trees, at a high elevation, open to the winds, and uncultivated and uninhabited.
- noun According to Schimper (“Plant-Geog.” (trans.), p. 743), the paramos, lying in the alpine region of the equatorial Cordilleras in Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, are essentially steppes, and are distinguished in character from the punas by their moisture. They begin at the limit of dwarf forest and shrub wood, are either treeless or bear isolated gnarled individuals, and are covered with a vegetation of grass and low herbs, with a peculiar taller growth of composite plants, called
frailejon (which see). Comparepuna .
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A high, bleak plateau or district, with stunted trees, and cold, damp atmosphere, as in the Andes, in South America.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun a
treeless grassland ecosystem covering extensive high areas ofequatorial mountains , especially inSouth America
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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This ecoregion is limited by altitude running from lowlands to 3300 meters (m) or ending when the vegetative structure changes to paramo, which is then considered the Sierra Marta paramo ecoregion.
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A 'paramo' in the Andes is a district some 1700 or 2000 fathoms high, where vegetation ceases, and the cold is piercing.
Celebrated Travels and Travellers Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century Jules Verne 1866
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South of Bogota an hour the paramo will lie in the dim glare and pools reflect a grey, metallic sky; the light shines with a brightness threatening because it hurts the corners of the eye.
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Huila has all the diversity too: the Magdalena valley is torrid, but it also has the snow capped Nevado del Huila, and part of the most extensive paramo in the Andes: El Paramo de Sumapaz, which stretches north along three departments.
Al Huila « Unknowing 2010
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In Colombia, outside of the capital which enjoys pure agua de paramo you have to be careful with the water.
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The southern body of water is an ecological restoration of high Andean wetlands like the paramo.
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Over this long dimension, there are four types of water, a 'chinampa' like area, an urban lake, a high andean lacustrine lake, or paramo, and the tilted planes of water on the ends.
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The wide topographic range supports an equally wide range of vegetation types with humid montane forest in the valleys and alpine fluvial tundra, and very wet sub-alpine paramo formations at higher levels.
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Overgrazing of the fragile paramo by cattle and sheep has occurred in the western areas of Filo de Plazapamba and Culebrillas Chico, resulting in extensive soil erosion and compaction.
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A subalpine rain-paramo zone occurs between 3,400 and 4,000 m, with three main vegetation types: Festuca tussock grassland; areas of cushion plants and other low-growing species, and undisturbed stands of bamboo Nuerolepsis sp.
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