Determining the changes occurring in tropical forests and their potential ramifications is a critical component of sustainable tropical forest functioning. One of the most notable changes in many tropical forests is the increase in liana abundance and biomass. This increase may be based on lianas' unique architecture and physiology, allowing them to respond rapidly to climatic and local environmental changes. Few efforts, however, have tried to combine multiple local patterns to determine whether there are generalities among liana changes. For example, we have little information about the liana species that are increasing, whether this increase in lianas is driven disproportionately by the most abundant species, and whether these increasing species are functionally similar. It is imperative to understand the ramifications of these changes for tropical forest functioning. Resolving these questions can be accomplished only with a diverse approach of replicated long-term forest monitoring and experiments that remove lianas, revealing the species that are increasing and those that are not under changing conditions, as well as the associated changes in forest functioning. This symposium will allow us to assemble a diverse group of researchers, all working at a local scale, to present data on liana dynamics in forests around the world and, ultimately, to formulate a synthetic and global understanding of the causes and consequences of changing liana dynamics in tropical forests.



In this symposium, we will focus on the latest research on liana ecology within the framework of understanding long-term species-specific patterns of liana demography, drivers of increasing liana abundance and biomass, and potential ramifications of liana increases. By assembling a diverse group of scientists who are using a variety of approaches to study local liana communities in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australia, we hope to determine whether the general pattern of increasing liana density and biomass is driven mainly by a small group of common liana species, what these species have in common, and develop informed and testable hypotheses for changing liana demography and increasing lianas in tropical forests. The list of talks we have assembled will showcase exciting research that will shed light on how liana populations are responding to changes in climate and the effects this is having on co-occurring trees and tropical forest dynamics in general. We are confident our symposium will be of broad interest to many ATBC attendees, especially those interested in long-term forest dynamics, liana-tree interactions, community ecology, and global change biology.