1). In total, 118 ha of (semi-)natural environments were converted

during the last 50 years. While natural or degraded forest is absent in the Virgen Yacu (Fig. 1), it represented 40% of total area in Panza catchment in 1963 and 29% in 2010 (Fig. 3). Average deforestation rate of natural dense forest between 1963 and 2010 equals 0.8%. Forests were mainly converted to agricultural lands (Fig. 3), which increased by 5.7 times in 50 years. Recently 145 ha of páramo were converted into pine plantations. The introduction of this exotic tree species was first promoted by the Ecuadorian government and, later, by international programs http://www.selleckchem.com/products/byl719.html for fuel wood demand, industrial purpose and mitigation climate change impacts through carbon sequestration (Farley, 2010, Vanacker et al., 2007 and Balthazar et al., 2014). The multi-temporal inventory for Llavircay counts 189 landslides (Fig. 2) for a total mapped landslide area of 1.8 × 105 m2. According to field observations, the majority of the landslides are shallow landslides with their sliding plane within the regolith. The multi-temporal inventory for Pangor counts 316 landslides in total (Fig. 1 and Fig. 3) for a total mapped landslide area of 1.7 × 105 m2 (of which 3 × 104 m2 corresponds to reactivations). 153 landslides were observed in the Virgen Yacu catchment, and 163 landslides

in the Panza catchment. In contrast to the Llavircay site, field observations revealed the presence of deep-seated bedrock landslides, mainly located on the riverbanks of incised rivers. Landslides are on Bcl-2 inhibitor average bigger in the eastern site than in the western sites (Table 2). Frattini and Crosta (2013) discussed the effect of cohesion and friction on landslide size distribution. Following their hypothesis, the larger size of the landslides in the Llavircay basin could be related to the bedrock geology, which is composed of phyllite and shales. These rocks are more susceptible to deep-seated landslides compared to the stiff volcanic rocks of the Pangor basin. Landslide frequency in Llavircay is within the range Racecadotril of the landslide

frequency observed in Pangor subcatchments. The landslide frequency is higher in the Virgen Yacu (14.30 landslides/km2) than in the Panza catchment (5.46 landslides/km2); and the landslide area is generally larger (median and mean) in the Virgen Yacu catchment (Table 2). A three-week long field validation of the landslide inventory of 2010 indicated that only very few small landslides were omitted in the remotely sensed dataset. Therefore, we cannot fully attribute these differences to uncertainties that could be associated with landslide detection under forest cover. Our data rather suggest this difference in landslide frequency is linked to different land cover dynamics between the two catchments.