Across Amazonia, a few places are distinctive in their heavy cover of woody vines.  Vines form a carpet of green that drapes over the canopies of widely spaced trees, sometimes forming a canopy only a couple of meters from the ground.  Their stems interlace like a bowl of woody spaghetti… with spines… This is Mata de Cipó, the official name for Vine Forest in Brazil and an understudied vegetation type.  It can occur from Bolivia, across Brazil to the mouth of the Amazon, and is most often found in the zone of transition between Cerrado (savannah) and Moist Tropical Forest.  The vegetation type is likely mediated by disturbance, but whether the disturbance is due to tree felling, soil compaction, climatic events like tornadoes or severe droughts, or even the decadal variation in inter-tropical atmospheric convergence is unknown.

Field Crew July 2016 at Dimona, PDBFF. Left to Right: Robyn, Elisangela Rocha, Paulo Piovesan, Gleison Viana Pereira, Zé Adailton

Virtually no ecological work has been carried out in the dense Mata de Cipó because of the difficulty of sampling and traversing such vegetation.  We aim to map the occurrence of Mata de Cipó across Amazonia, characterize the vegetation in terms of number and composition of liana and tree stems per m², determine whether specific sites of Mata de Cipó are expanding toward wetter or drier regions, and finally map a strategy for determining the origin of the vegetation type.  This final goal will be accomplished by partnering with geographers who have expertise in anthropology, climatology, aerial imagery, and satellite imagery of vegetation, all of which provide parameters that constrain the origin hypotheses and may be specific to certain regions.

Because an increase in number and size of lianas has been documented for the Amazon Basin in numerous studies, this liana-rich vegetation type may become more common in favorable areas.  However, liana forest is forbidding to most biologists: the tangled stems require different approaches for study and mapping than other vegetation types. If lianas sequester less carbon than trees with a similar-sized canopy, we anticipate that controlling the spread of Mata de Cipó will be a high priority in climatically vulnerable or in degraded areas of Amazonia.  Our work has begun in Mato Grosso, the third largest state in Brazil, in which much of the former rainforest – cerrado transition has been cut to provide areas for soybean cultivation.  A high degree of integration within the state park system has given us the opportunity to visit and study the Mata de Cipó that remains.The following questions guide our team as we continues this work:

João, one of Robyn Burnham’s collaborators in the field, standing next to a gigantic Schnella from Manaus

• Which vine species dominates in each patch of Mata de Cipó?
• Do areas of former human occupation (terra preta) co-occur with Mata de Cipó?
• Are the vines clonal within Mata de Cipo or reproducing by seeds?
• Do most species of vines in Mato de Cipó regenerate only under high light environments?
• What is the proportion of short-lived vine stems, i.e. mostly herbaceous members of the Cucurbitaceae, Convovulaceae, Acanthaceae, etc.?  Is this similar to the low proportions of these stems in consistently wet forest?