Lianas are taking over the rainforests, and it's visible from space(phys.org)
phys.org
Lianas are taking over the rainforests, and it's visible from space
https://phys.org/news/2025-05-lianas-rainforests-visible-space.html
42 comments
There is a tree that survives lightning strikes, and thrives, because the lightning kills all the surrounding lianas, and also other competing trees.
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/11/nx-s1-5357412/lightning-tree-...
I have observed the exact same scenario in the southern US all my life except the vines are mustang grapevines.
And kudzu.
> "All plants grow faster with more CO₂, but lianas benefit even more."
I have read other articles (by climate scientists) that say that the increase on CO₂ is not sufficient for this to be significant.
> "We shouldn't intervene until we fully understand their ecological role"
Given the dramatic damage he says it is doing in some areas, surely cutting them in at least those areas would make sense?
I have read other articles (by climate scientists) that say that the increase on CO₂ is not sufficient for this to be significant.
> "We shouldn't intervene until we fully understand their ecological role"
Given the dramatic damage he says it is doing in some areas, surely cutting them in at least those areas would make sense?
The effect depends on the plant and on its environment.
While more CO2 is good for plants, the associated changes in temperature and humidity can be bad and they can counterbalance the effect of increased CO2.
There has been a recently published study, for which I cannot remember a link, which has evaluated the current effects of the climate change for 7 major plant crops. For 3 of them, including rice, increased CO2 has resulted in higher productions, but for other 4, including maize, the associated changes in air temperature and humidity has determined lower productions, despite the higher availability of CO2.
While more CO2 is good for plants, the associated changes in temperature and humidity can be bad and they can counterbalance the effect of increased CO2.
There has been a recently published study, for which I cannot remember a link, which has evaluated the current effects of the climate change for 7 major plant crops. For 3 of them, including rice, increased CO2 has resulted in higher productions, but for other 4, including maize, the associated changes in air temperature and humidity has determined lower productions, despite the higher availability of CO2.
Those are for specific crops.
Presumably, if some crops become higher yielding (in a particular area) people will plant more of them so the next effect will be higher plant growth.
Similarly, in nature, plants that benefit most will spread, so the net effect will be higher plant growth.
SO overall we should have an increase in plant growth?
Presumably, if some crops become higher yielding (in a particular area) people will plant more of them so the next effect will be higher plant growth.
Similarly, in nature, plants that benefit most will spread, so the net effect will be higher plant growth.
SO overall we should have an increase in plant growth?
> Given the dramatic damage he says it is doing in some areas, surely cutting them in at least those areas would make sense?
You being personally convinced about something doesn't mean you can't be aware of your own limitations and want to be careful about implementing solutions too early to limit their impact of you're wrong.
The difference is clear when you give an opinion about someone else's problems and how they should proceed vs when you have to decide about your own life. It's harder to implement change when you have to live with the consequences.
You being personally convinced about something doesn't mean you can't be aware of your own limitations and want to be careful about implementing solutions too early to limit their impact of you're wrong.
The difference is clear when you give an opinion about someone else's problems and how they should proceed vs when you have to decide about your own life. It's harder to implement change when you have to live with the consequences.
Yes, but which is the lesser risk then?
There seems to be a bias to do nothing rather than do something even if there are known benefits to doing something.
There are definitely lots of consequences to lots of things we have done with regard to climate change and pollution. If we avoided everything with consequences the only action is do nothing.
> The difference is clear when you give an opinion about someone else's problems
The global environment is everyone's problem, surely?
There seems to be a bias to do nothing rather than do something even if there are known benefits to doing something.
There are definitely lots of consequences to lots of things we have done with regard to climate change and pollution. If we avoided everything with consequences the only action is do nothing.
> The difference is clear when you give an opinion about someone else's problems
The global environment is everyone's problem, surely?
> The global environment is everyone's problem, surely?
That's my point, it falls in the "you have to live with it" category.
That's my point, it falls in the "you have to live with it" category.
> The leaves that make lianas ultra-efficient reflect more light and infrared radiation than tree foliage.
> "Tree leaves tilt, allowing light to reach lower neighbors—even the forest floor gets some sunlight. But lianas leave almost nothing for others."
But that seems like a mechanism that could help reduce rising temperature
> "Tree leaves tilt, allowing light to reach lower neighbors—even the forest floor gets some sunlight. But lianas leave almost nothing for others."
But that seems like a mechanism that could help reduce rising temperature
> But that seems like a mechanism that could help reduce rising temperature
Correct me if I’m wrong, but afaik higher reflection rates would exacerbate climate change, not help it. Absorbing that radiation kickstarts photosynthesis, which in turn uses captured CO2, therefore I’d expect the amount of sunlight reflected has a negatively inverse relationship with the amount of CO2 captured. I could very well be wrong, I’m not a biologist, but higher rates of both sunlight & CO2 capture seem ideal in this instance.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but afaik higher reflection rates would exacerbate climate change, not help it. Absorbing that radiation kickstarts photosynthesis, which in turn uses captured CO2, therefore I’d expect the amount of sunlight reflected has a negatively inverse relationship with the amount of CO2 captured. I could very well be wrong, I’m not a biologist, but higher rates of both sunlight & CO2 capture seem ideal in this instance.
Only certain sections of the spectrum kickstarts photosynthesis. The rest heats the leaf, increasing Earth temperatures.
The plant wouldn't survive if it reflected the 400-500 and 600-700 nm light. Note that I said "and"; there are plants that rely on a less-efficient 600-700 band; they are often reddish in appearance even when fully functioning. (The reddish color of dead autumn leaves is because the chlorophyll is more volatile, leaving only the red pigmentation responsible for the less-efficient means of photosynthesis.)
The plant wouldn't survive if it reflected the 400-500 and 600-700 nm light. Note that I said "and"; there are plants that rely on a less-efficient 600-700 band; they are often reddish in appearance even when fully functioning. (The reddish color of dead autumn leaves is because the chlorophyll is more volatile, leaving only the red pigmentation responsible for the less-efficient means of photosynthesis.)
Tapeworms of the rainforest… ugh.
> He attributes this to rising atmospheric CO₂ levels. "All plants grow faster with more CO₂, but lianas benefit even more
And yet this extra growth all around because of co2 means that the will be more co2? This seems incoherent.
Pet peeve - if the article hooks you with a line like 'visible from space' they should provide the imagery so I can see for myself. But there's no picture.
And yet this extra growth all around because of co2 means that the will be more co2? This seems incoherent.
Pet peeve - if the article hooks you with a line like 'visible from space' they should provide the imagery so I can see for myself. But there's no picture.
> And yet this extra growth all around because of co2 means that the will be more co2? This seems incoherent.
It's not. Atmospheric CO2 increases as a result of processes external and unrelated to these forests. There's no suggestion or reason to think that plant growth would or could counteract that trend.
> Pet peeve - if the article hooks you with a line like 'visible from space' they should provide the imagery so I can see for myself. But there's no picture.
It would be nice, but I suspect it's missing for the same reason imagery is missing from so many astronomical articles, too: there aren't any images, because the findings are numerical and statistical, not visual.
The detection process that the article describes certainly sounds as thought it wouldn't be visible. To make the findings visible to readers of this article, the researcher would need to build it from effect, addin false color to an image to make it visible. And even then the differences may be too miniscule to be visible to the naked eye without considerable additional manipulation.
Those images likely don't exist, and creating them would be a lot of work for a probably small team of researchers who don't have a lot of extra labor or spare money.
It's not. Atmospheric CO2 increases as a result of processes external and unrelated to these forests. There's no suggestion or reason to think that plant growth would or could counteract that trend.
> Pet peeve - if the article hooks you with a line like 'visible from space' they should provide the imagery so I can see for myself. But there's no picture.
It would be nice, but I suspect it's missing for the same reason imagery is missing from so many astronomical articles, too: there aren't any images, because the findings are numerical and statistical, not visual.
The detection process that the article describes certainly sounds as thought it wouldn't be visible. To make the findings visible to readers of this article, the researcher would need to build it from effect, addin false color to an image to make it visible. And even then the differences may be too miniscule to be visible to the naked eye without considerable additional manipulation.
Those images likely don't exist, and creating them would be a lot of work for a probably small team of researchers who don't have a lot of extra labor or spare money.
The previous paragraph explains it:
>Lianas are rapidly expanding their territory in tropical forests, sometimes suppressing tree growth entirely in certain locations. In such areas, forest regeneration halts, and carbon storage can decline by as much as 95%. "That's almost equivalent to deforestation," Visser says.
There's more more CO₂ in the atmosphere; so more lianas grow; they choke out the main tree body; so less CO₂ is absorbed; so there's more CO₂ in the atmosphere, _e.t.c._
>Lianas are rapidly expanding their territory in tropical forests, sometimes suppressing tree growth entirely in certain locations. In such areas, forest regeneration halts, and carbon storage can decline by as much as 95%. "That's almost equivalent to deforestation," Visser says.
There's more more CO₂ in the atmosphere; so more lianas grow; they choke out the main tree body; so less CO₂ is absorbed; so there's more CO₂ in the atmosphere, _e.t.c._
Still, this does not sound right. You are hinting towards some predator-prey-type of cycle: trees grow (and absorb CO2), lianas infest them (and by the way, they appear to absorb even more CO2), but then trees die, and lianas die with them. But then won't trees grow again, and the cycle would repeat? Maybe overall, this cycle would reduce some CO2 absorption, but by 95%?
There's some interesting results here[0] but from what I can make out the trees don't necessarily die and take the liana(s) with them. They may continue to stand (dead) or may simply be hugely starved of light.
[0]https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.13...
[0]https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.13...
Came here for this … “Big foot caught on camera!!” - all text article …
I don't think that really counts as a "picture from space" in common parlance, but I guess maybe a picture from Euclidean space?
"visible in satellite imagery" is the quote in the article, which is refined in the paper as:
Stand scale (900-m2 scale) data used satellite imagery from previous studies to contrast liana-infested and liana-sparse forest patches in Bolivia and French Guiana. In both cases, we obtained the original images used, which included a 30-m resolution Landsat Thematic Mapper (L1TP) image (French Guiana) and hyperspectral Hyperion imagery from NASA's EO-1 satellite (Bolivia).
Stand scale (900-m2 scale) data used satellite imagery from previous studies to contrast liana-infested and liana-sparse forest patches in Bolivia and French Guiana. In both cases, we obtained the original images used, which included a 30-m resolution Landsat Thematic Mapper (L1TP) image (French Guiana) and hyperspectral Hyperion imagery from NASA's EO-1 satellite (Bolivia).
I agree, wanted a pic.
But for CO2. Guess they didn't spell it out. If the Lianas kill the tree, and the Lianas absorb less CO2 than a tree, then even though there is an increase in Liana growth, there is also less tree growth, so net less CO2 absorbed.
But for CO2. Guess they didn't spell it out. If the Lianas kill the tree, and the Lianas absorb less CO2 than a tree, then even though there is an increase in Liana growth, there is also less tree growth, so net less CO2 absorbed.
It’s not just the tree, it’s everything that grew below the canopy that now can’t because the vines block out all the sunlight.
> And yet this extra growth all around because of co2 means that the will be more co2? This seems incoherent.
If trees die (because of the lianas) faster than they grow, it's not impossible at all.
Nature generally balances itself (with more CO2 getting balanced by more plant growth) on the long term, not necessarily on the short term.
If trees die (because of the lianas) faster than they grow, it's not impossible at all.
Nature generally balances itself (with more CO2 getting balanced by more plant growth) on the long term, not necessarily on the short term.
Small statistical deviations on satellite imagery isn’t necessarily very sexy for popular science. Especially when it’s in the non visible light spectrum, Landsat and Sentinel-2 satellites have bands that are great for analysing vegetation, but they are not very beautiful when converted to colours visible to humans.
A quick check from the referenced papers only mention a 2008 dataset from Landsat in a meta analysis. And no fancy pictures to look at.
A quick check from the referenced papers only mention a 2008 dataset from Landsat in a meta analysis. And no fancy pictures to look at.
Yeah, the article is bait.
The original research just says "Global increase of lianas in tropical forests", the addition of "from space" is to get clicks here.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.17485
That's the better link to use for this anyway. It's open access so no reason not to go to the source.
It appears to be heavily statistical and based on scraping many studies for a meta analysis.
"Our meta-analysis resulted in 505 effect sizes (ES) extracted from 39 unique studies (Figure 2). An initial exploratory analysis following the vote counting approach showed a general trend of increasing liana prevalence throughout the tropics is evinced by 333 positive ES (66%) compared to 172 ES (34%) with decreasing or stable trends. After grouping ES per life stage and aggregating the results reported at the species level, 155 ES and their respective standard errors (SE) were obtained. The general increasing pattern and its geographical coverage hold for the reduced dataset, with 112 ES (72%) showing an increasing trend."
The original research just says "Global increase of lianas in tropical forests", the addition of "from space" is to get clicks here.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.17485
That's the better link to use for this anyway. It's open access so no reason not to go to the source.
It appears to be heavily statistical and based on scraping many studies for a meta analysis.
"Our meta-analysis resulted in 505 effect sizes (ES) extracted from 39 unique studies (Figure 2). An initial exploratory analysis following the vote counting approach showed a general trend of increasing liana prevalence throughout the tropics is evinced by 333 positive ES (66%) compared to 172 ES (34%) with decreasing or stable trends. After grouping ES per life stage and aggregating the results reported at the species level, 155 ES and their respective standard errors (SE) were obtained. The general increasing pattern and its geographical coverage hold for the reduced dataset, with 112 ES (72%) showing an increasing trend."
> But there's no picture.
There is no picture because they are not visible from space. They are refering to a model that estimate their presence from satellite images. Which is not what people understand by "visible".
There is no picture because they are not visible from space. They are refering to a model that estimate their presence from satellite images. Which is not what people understand by "visible".
Trees have nothing to do with global warming. It is entirely caused by coal and oil. The only meaningful carbon storage would be pumping it back into the ground.
Let's not personify and demonize vines as a casus belli to destroy the environment in the name of saving it, please.
Let's not personify and demonize vines as a casus belli to destroy the environment in the name of saving it, please.
Trees have a lot to do with it, they are made of carbon and they absorb tons of it. They also pump it back into the soil.
The article ends:
> Can anything be done about the liana problem? Should we start cutting them down? Definitely not, says Visser. "We shouldn't intervene until we fully understand their ecological role. They bear fruit year-round and are vital for rare monkey and bird species." The only necessary action, he insists, is halting climate change, which will also slow the expansion of lianas.
> Can anything be done about the liana problem? Should we start cutting them down? Definitely not, says Visser. "We shouldn't intervene until we fully understand their ecological role. They bear fruit year-round and are vital for rare monkey and bird species." The only necessary action, he insists, is halting climate change, which will also slow the expansion of lianas.
> Trees have nothing to do with global warming
Citation needed
>Let's not personify and demonize vines
who is personifying and demonizing vines? again, citation needed
Citation needed
>Let's not personify and demonize vines
who is personifying and demonizing vines? again, citation needed
Trees are our best bet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43936450
Can't wait to pay taxes on lianas
> it's visible from space (phys.org)
Misleading headline again (this is a pattern), they are not visible from space, they can be estimated based on satellite images using a complex model. That's not at all what common people understand by "visible".
Misleading headline again (this is a pattern), they are not visible from space, they can be estimated based on satellite images using a complex model. That's not at all what common people understand by "visible".
> they are not visible from space, they can be estimated based on satellite images using a complex model.
Much like a human brain estimates or imagines an image based on a complex model transformation of sensor data from various cones arrayed within the eyes.
Here we have a straightforward, readily pipelined, multispectral transformation that combines 'colours' from the non (human) visible part of the greater spectrum and creates a shifted blended colour image in the human eye visible part of the spectrum such that target vegetation is prominent.
In the remote sensing domain calling such things visible has been common parlance for three decades.
It's similar to that trope scene in action films that has a sniper using a thermal filter to enhance body heat for better target imaging.
Much like a human brain estimates or imagines an image based on a complex model transformation of sensor data from various cones arrayed within the eyes.
Here we have a straightforward, readily pipelined, multispectral transformation that combines 'colours' from the non (human) visible part of the greater spectrum and creates a shifted blended colour image in the human eye visible part of the spectrum such that target vegetation is prominent.
In the remote sensing domain calling such things visible has been common parlance for three decades.
It's similar to that trope scene in action films that has a sniper using a thermal filter to enhance body heat for better target imaging.
I'm also just about visible from space at 30cm resolution
https://microsites.maxar.com/30cm/
https://microsites.maxar.com/30cm/
> “The word liana does not refer to a taxonomic grouping, but rather a habit of plant growth – much like tree or shrub.“