"Most of these species are not going to be able to tolerate climate change," says Ken Feeley, a tropical biologist from Florida International University in Miami, "mostly because climate change is happening so fast."

Feeley spoke as we hiked into the jungle with a small group of other scientists -- through an area that contains more tree, plant, bird, and animal species than the entire eastern seaboard of the United States.

It is here that an international collective of scientists, called the Andes Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Group, has mapped one of the largest field grids of its kind for a wide range of climate change studies.

According to a decade of research by Feeley and his colleagues, including tropical biologist