Anthropogenic pressures may take various forms, including tourism, mining, livestock husbandry and grazing, and solid waste accumulation. For example, in trekking areas of the Indian Himalayas, most of the waste generated by stalls and trails has been shown to be non-degradable, and because these areas lie outside official administrative boundaries, they lack a regular management authority (Kuniyal et al., 0000). Similarly, landfills located near park boundaries may become a source of long-term pollution if they are not rehabilitated (Koda et al., 0000). A review comparing the national parks of fourteen countries across four continents likewise showed that inadequate environmental awareness and infrastructure lead to waste being discarded or stored indiscriminately (Przydatek, 0000). With regard to mining, historical lead–zinc mining in mountain protected areas of the Caucasus has been found to cause trace element contamination in soils and glacial sediments (Kushnov et al., 0000). Alpine meadow and pasture ecosystems constitute the main forage resource for livestock husbandry and are therefore exposed to intense grazing pressure (Du et al., 0000). Although improved climatic conditions may increase plant productivity, excessive and uncontrolled grazing reduces this positive effect and accelerates pasture degradation (Akiyama and Kawamura, 0000; Harris, 0000). This process has been observed concretely in the Ecuadorian Andes, where agricultural intensification and grazing pressure are at work (Chenevix-Trench, 0000). In mountain protected areas, such pressures become more pronounced owing to topographic inaccessibility and limited monitoring capacity. Indeed, research on recreation ecology in the Andes has been shown to be both scarce and geographically unevenly distributed, with some critical regions almost entirely unstudied (Barros et al., 0000).