Lianas associated with continued forest biomass losses following large-scale disturbances

Lianas are important to rainforest ecosystems but often impede tree growth and increase tree mortality and stem damage after disturbances that favour their growth. Understanding how lianas affect biomass recovery and rates of carbon sequestration following disturbance is therefore of crucial importance. In this study, we determine how a tropical forest recovers biomass following a large-scale disturbance and test how this varies with liana dominance and stem damage. We use remote sensing methods to develop a model, validated by field data from 40 20 m x 20 m vegetation plots, to measure change in tree above-ground biomass eight years after Tropical Cyclone Yasi damaged logged forests in the Australian Wet Tropics. We related tree biomass changes to field measures of current liana dominance over trees, expressed as liana: tree basal area ratio, and assessed how these measures related to tree stem damage. Biomass declined in 34 of the 40 plots during the eight years post-disturbance, with..., , , # Lianas associated with continued forest biomass losses following large-scale disturbances

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.prr4xgxvh](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.prr4xgxvh)

We measured tree biomass across a plot network of 40 20-m x 20-m vegetation plots in the rainforests of the Australian Wet Tropics. Field-measured biomass and remotely sensed predictors derived from RapidEye Surface Reflectance imagery were used to create a predictive biomass model that could be: i) upscaled to predict biomass across the broader study landscape, and ii) applied to historic remote sensing data to predict biomass in the past, and therefore measure biomass change through time. Remotely sensed predictors included textural metrics of the red-edge and NIR spectral bands and elevation extracted from a DEM. Biomass changes at the plot-level were related to field-measured liana: tree ratio (liana basal area relative to tree basal area) and the proportion of broken tree stems. 

This dataset contains the o...