DR. JEANINE RHEMTULLA (Orcid ID : 0000-0002-1339-0015) Article type : Paper LRH: Wilson and Rhemtulla RRH: Tree Diversity in Fragmented Andean Cloud forest Small montane cloud forest fragments are important for conserving tree diversity in the Ecuadorian Andes Sarah Jane Wilson1 and Jeanine M. Rhemtulla2 1 School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan, 440 Church St., Ann Arbor, MI. 48109 2 Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, University of British Columbia, 2424 Main Mall, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z4 Canada Corresponding author; e-mail:
[email protected]. Received 22 June 2017; revision accepted 11 December 2017. Author Manuscript This is the author manuscript accepted for publication and has undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as doi: 10.1111/btp.12542 This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved ABSTRACT Montane tropical cloud forests, with their complex topography, biodiversity, high numbers of endemic species, and rapid rates of clearing are a top global conservation priority. However, species distributions at local and landscape scales in cloud forests are still poorly understood, in part because few regions have been surveyed. Empirical work has focused on species distributions along elevation gradients, but spatial variation among forests at the same elevation is less commonly investigated. In this study, the first to compare tree communities across multiple Andean cloud forests at similar elevations, we surveyed trees in five ridge-top forest reserves at the upper end of the ‘mid-elevation diversity bulge’ (1900-2250 masl) in the Intag Valley, a heavily deforested region in the Ecuadorian Andes.