The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and lead author Dr. Geertje van der Heijden found evidence that woody climbing vines called lianas are preventing trees from absorbing carbon on a massive scale.
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Vines are dependent upon strong trees as they climb in search of sunlight that exists only above the multi-layer tree canopy. “Combined with the recently reported increases in liana abundance, these results indicate that lianas are an important and increasing agent of change in the carbon dynamics of tropical forests”.
Researchers suggest that lianas could have a massive impact on tropical forests in longer terms and can reduce storage of carbon up to 35 percent. The speed at which carbon is released varies greatly between the two due to the duration of their lifespan.
Marquette University scientists determined in a first-ever forest-level experimental study on the subject that an increase in woody vines in tropical forests may be significantly accelerating climate change, according to a release by Marquette University.
Previous research by Schnitzer and collaborators has determined that lianas can have significant negative effects on forest biomass growth and accumulation. These research, nevertheless, targeted totally on tree development, had been restricted to forest gaps or had been exclusively observational.
To better understand how vines limit the growth of trees, researchers cut down all lianas within eight experimental plots located in Panama’s Barro Colorado Nature Monument, while leaving a few vines untouched in others. This lower was due each to decrease tree development and to a rise in tree mortality the place lianas had been current. For the following three years, researchers monitored the expansion in diameter of timber and lianas within the plot, and picked up and weighed useless leaves and different particles falling from the forest cover. Lianas not exclusively lowered biomass accumulation, but in addition shifted it from wooden, which shops carbon for a very long time, to leaves, which rot shortly and launch carbon again to the environment. The proportion of biomass in leaves versus wood differed as well: forest canopy productivity-mostly leaves-decreased by 14 percent in liana-free plots, while the productivity of woody stems rose by nearly 65 percent.
These outcomes have dramatic implications for the capability of tropical forests to function a sink for carbon sooner or later.
“Our results clearly demonstrate large differences in carbon cycling between forests with and without lianas”. These reductions could be even more severe if “liana-tree competition” intensifies in the future.
We depend on the trees found in these tropical areas to take up a few of the carbon dioxide that we are emitting, so not all of our emissions end up in the atmosphere.
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