Gentry's Forest Transect Data Set (Missouri Botanical Garden, St Louis, in the press) Global Patterns of Plant Diversity: Alwyn H. 9, 5th edn (International Soil Reference and Information Centre, FAO, Rome, 1995) (ed.) Procedures for Soil Analysis, Tech. Spatial and temporal patterns of Amazon rainfall: consequences for the planning of agricultural occupation and the protection of primary forests. Estimating Biomass and Biomass Change of Tropical Forests: a Primer (Food and Agriculture Organisation Forestry Paper 134, Rome, 1997) Integrating liana abundance and forest stature into an estimate of total aboveground biomass for an eastern Amazonian forest. An international network to monitor the structure, composition and dynamics of Amazonian forests (RAINFOR).

II: Additional hypothesis testing in quantitative ethnobotany. A 300 million year record of atmospheric carbon dioxide from fossil plant cuticles. Liana biomass and leaf-area of a tierra firme forest in the Rio Negro basin, Venezuela. The changing ecology of tropical forests. Increasing turnover through time in tropical forests. Rain forest fragmentation and the structure of Amazonian liana communities. In deep shade, elevated CO2 increases the vigour of tropical climbing plants. Allocation patterns in two tropical vines in response to increased atmospheric CO2. Assessing the response of plant functional types to climatic change in tropical forests. CO2 stabilisation, climate change and the terrestrial carbon sink. Acceleration of global warming due to carbon-cycle feedbacks in a coupled climate model. The ecology of lianas and their role in forests. Tropical forests and atmospheric carbon dioxide. in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis Ch. Changes in the biomass of tropical forests: evaluating potential biases. Changes in the carbon balance of tropical forest: evidence from long-term plots. Carbon dioxide transfer over a Central Amazonian rain forest. Carbon dioxide uptake by an undisturbed tropical rain-forest in Southwest Amazonia, 1992-1993.

Predictions of future tropical carbon fluxes will need to account for the changing composition and dynamics of supposedly undisturbed forests. Lianas enhance tree mortality and suppress tree growth 7, so their rapid increase implies that the tropical terrestrial carbon sink may shut down sooner than current models suggest 8, 9, 10. Over the last two decades of the twentieth century the dominance of large lianas relative to trees has increased by 1.7–4.6% a year. Here we show that non-fragmented Amazon forests are experiencing a concerted increase in the density, basal area and mean size of woody climbing plants (lianas). Such changes could reduce or enhance the carbon storage potential of old-growth forests in the long term. However, it is unclear whether the recent increase in tree biomass has been accompanied by a shift in community composition. Ecological orthodoxy suggests that old-growth forests should be close to dynamic equilibrium, but this view has been challenged by recent findings that neotropical forests are accumulating carbon 1, 2 and biomass 3, 4, possibly in response to the increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide 5, 6.

Amazon liana miana rugs