Reciprocal interactions between lianas and forest soil

This chapter reviews the available data on how variation in soils affects lianas, and how lianas affect soils. First, it reviews some of the ways that variation in soils within and among tropical forests may affect lianas. Next, the chapter discusses how lianas may affect soils and key ecosystem properties and processes such as soil moisture and nutrient cycling. It contrasts liana-soil relationships with tree-soil relationships and differentiates among what points are firmly established in the literature, which ideas are speculative, and which directions for future studies may be especially fruitful. The few studies on the effect of lianas on forest ecosystem functioning in terms of hydrology, nutrient cycling, and trace gas emissions have yielded tantalizing results that hint at potentially large effects that do not scale with their biomass.