Published March 31, 2022 | Version 1.0
Dataset Open

Data from: Vegetative phenologies of lianas and trees in two Neotropical forests with contrasting rainfall regimes

Authors/Creators

  • 1. Forest Global Earth Observatory, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, PO Box 37012, Washington, DC 20013, USA
  • 2. Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, PO Box 0843-03092, Balboa, Ancón, Republic of Panamá
  • 3. Forest Ecology and Forest Management Group, Wageningen University and Research Centre, Wageningen, 6708 PB, The Netherlands
  • 4. Department of Biological Sciences, Marquette University, PO Box 1881, Milwaukee, WI 53201, USA

Description

  1. Among tropical forests, lianas are predicted to have a growth advantage over trees during seasonal drought, with substantial implications for tree and forest dynamics. We tested the hypotheses that lianas maintain higher water status than trees during seasonal drought and that lianas maximize leaf cover to match high, dry-season light conditions while trees are more limited by moisture availability during the dry season.
  2. We monitored the seasonal dynamics of predawn and midday leaf water potentials and leaf phenology for branches of 16 liana and 16 tree species in the canopy of two lowland tropical forests with contrasting rainfall regimes in Panama.
  3. In a wet, weakly seasonal forest, lianas maintained higher water balance than trees and maximized their leaf cover during dry-season conditions, when light availability was high, while trees experienced drought stress. In a drier, strongly seasonal forest, lianas and trees displayed similar dry season reductions in leaf cover following strong decreases in soil water availability.
  4. Greater soil moisture availability and a higher capacity to maintain water status allow lianas to maintain the turgor potentials critical for plant growth in a wet and weakly seasonal forest but not in a dry and strongly seasonal forest.

Notes

The file metadata.txt contains the details regarding each dataset and code. Please refer to the corresponding paper published in New Phytologist for further details. This work is part of the research project 'Explaining the rapid increase in lianas in tropical forest' with project number 824.14.006, which is financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), and also supported by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI).

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