Towards a liana plant functional type for vegetation models

Hans Verbeeck; Hannes P T De Deurwaerder; Elizabeth Kearsley; Sruthi M Krishna Moorthy; Francis Mumbanza Mundondo; Kasper Coppieters; Stefan A Schnitzer; Marcos Longo; Marc Peaucelle; Marijn Bauters; Félicien Meunier

doi:10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2024.110901

Towards a liana plant functional type for vegetation models

Ecol Modell. 2024 Dec:498:110901. doi: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2024.110901.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Q-ForestLab, Department of Environment, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
² Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, United States.
³ BlueGreen Labs, Melsele, Belgium.
⁴ Pembroke College, University of Oxford.
⁵ Department of Biological Sciences, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201, United States.
⁶ Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Balboa, Ancon, Republic of Panama.
⁷ Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley CA, United States.
⁸ INRAE, Soil-Plant-Atmosphere Interactions laboratory (UMR ISPA), Villenave d'Ornon, France.
⁹ PLECO (Plants and Ecosystems), Department of Biology, University of Antwerp, Wilrijk, Belgium.
¹⁰ Department of Green Chemistry and Technology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.

Abstract

Lianas (woody climbers) are crucial components of tropical forests and they have been increasingly recognized to have profound effects on tropical forest carbon dynamics. Despite their importance, lianas' representation in vegetation models remains limited, partly due to the complexity of liana-tree dynamics and the diversity in liana life history strategies. This paper provides a comprehensive review of advances and challenges for mechanistically representing lianas in forest ecosystem models and a proposed path towards effectively representing lianas in these models. Defining a liana plant functional type is a significant challenge because of the high morphological and physiological diversity amongst liana species, and because of their structural association with trees. Here, we identify critical liana traits that likely should contribute to establishing a liana plant functional type, along with key processes to properly represent lianas in ecosystem models. Subsequently, we discuss a variety of possible liana implementation strategies with their associated strengths, limitations, computational costs and data requirements. A fundamental redesign of the tree-centric demographic vegetation models seems appropriate to accommodate the unique growth and competition strategies of lianas. We illustrate the potential of such models with a single-site case study where we disentangle putative mechanisms of liana increasing abundance. Furthermore, we underscore the critical need for comprehensive liana demographic and functional data (including long-term, physiological, and pantropical observations) for the qualitative implementation and evaluation in the proposed modeling efforts. Currently, there is a scarcity of liana data and the data that do exist have a neotropical bias. We finally introduce a new liana functional trait database that can centralize existing liana trait data, incentivize improved data gathering and thus facilitate model development and scientific analyses.

Keywords: Lianas; Plant functional type; Tropical forest; Vegetation model.