Planet of the vines

• Autores: William Laurance
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2937, 2013, págs. 42-43
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Laurance talks about climbing plants that are taking over the world's forest. Francis Putz, a biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, highlighted this fraught relationship in a 1980 paper entitled "Lianas vs trees". Lianas, or woody vines, can grow to be hundreds of meters long, with stems over half a meter across. Trees pay a high price for their presence. Oliver Phillips of the University of Leeds in the UK and his colleagues revealed in 2002 that lianas had increased sharply at the expense of trees at sites across western Amazonia. A likely cause is that tropical forests around the globe are becoming more dynamic, with trees dying and regenerating more rapidly--conditions that strongly favor vines. It is possible that global warming is intensifying windstorms that increase tree fall in the affected areas, yet there is little evidence for such an effect.