In their explorations of the mountains of the equinoctial regions of America, Humboldt and Bonpland (1807) recognized the role of elevation, topography, and climate on the distribution of plants and animals. The topography of the mountains plays a primary role in the regulation of their climate, soil type, primary productivity, and vegetation structure (Antonelli et al., 2018;Badgley et al., 2017), but the processes underlying this association are not well understood (Perrigo et al., 2020). Although the influence of topography on the distribution of species at different spatial scales has been recognized for many taxa of plants, birds, mammals, and insects (Binz et al.,