Lianas, woody vines acting as structural parasites of trees, have profound effects on the composition and structure of tropical forests, impacting tree growth, mortality, and forest succession. Remote sensing could offer a powerful tool for quantifying the scale of liana infestation, provided the availability of robust detection methods. We analyze the consistency and global geographic specificity of spectral signals—reflectan...

Stomata play a central role in surface–atmosphere exchange by controlling the flux of water and CO 2 between the leaf and the atmosphere. Representation of stomatal conductance ( g sw ) is therefore an essential component of models that seek to simulate water and CO 2 exchange in plants and ecosystems. For given environmental conditions at the leaf surface (CO 2 concentration and vapor pressure deficit or relative humidity), m...

In an era of rapid global change, our ability to understand and predict Earth's natural systems is lagging behind our ability to monitor and measure changes in the biosphere. Bottlenecks to informing models with observations have reduced our capacity to fully exploit the growing volume and variety of available data. Here, we take a critical look at the information infrastructure that connects ecosystem modeling and measurement...

Stomata regulate CO 2 uptake for photosynthesis and water loss through transpiration. The approaches used to represent stomatal conductance ( g s ) in models vary. In particular, current understanding of drivers of the variation in a key parameter in those models, the slope parameter (i.e. a measure of intrinsic plant water‐use‐efficiency), is still limited, particularly in the tropics. Here we collected diurnal measurements o...