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Featured article:

Epiphyte response to drought and experimental warming in an Andean cloud forest [v2; ref status: indexed, https://f1000r.es/3le]

Previously titled: Epiphyte response to drought and experimental warming

PUBLISHED: 06 June 2014

Joshua M. Rapp, Miles R. Silman

Climate change is expected to raise the cloud base in tropical mountainous areas of the Andes, which would have an especially harsh impact on the cloud forest ecosystems in the area as they source much of their moisture through cloud immersion. Epiphytes (plants that grow on other plants) are considered good indicator species for monitoring the effects of climate change on these ecosystems, due to their sensitivity to atmospheric conditions.

In this study Rapp & Silman attempted to mimic future climate change by moving epiphytes lower down the mountain, below the cloud base where conditions tend to be warmer and drier (they transplanted in the other direction to control for the effects of moving the plants to a different elevation). They monitored the plants over the course of a year and as a general rule epiphytes transplanted downhill performed worse than those transplanted in the opposite direction. However, there is a silver lining in that some species showed greater than expected resistance to experimentally induced climate change.