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Mountain ecosystems provide key services to a large portion of the population in the tropics. However, they are particularly vulnerable to regional environmental changes such as soil degradation, via soil erosion and associated nutrient loss, both dissolved in runoff and suspended in sediment. Current trends in land use conversion combined with projections of intensified hydrological extremes potentially amplify these threats. We analyze the interactive effects of rainfall characteristics (at three time scales) and vegetation cover on the runoff–erosion–nutrient loss progression for a group of vegetation cover types that represent different land use conversion stages. After a year of observations we found, as expected, that natural forests have the highest potential for regulating precipitation–runoff–erosion–nutrient loss. The highest amounts of runoff occurred in pasturelands, and croplands had the highest …