A group from the University of Tokyo and the Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute has revealed that the distribution pattern of woody vines, mainly in temperate regions of the Japanese archipelago, differs depending on the climbing style.
Woody vines are trees that depend on others to support their weight.Previous research on woody vines has been based primarily on data from the tropics.Furthermore, there are few studies that take into account the diversity of vines regarding their wide-scale distribution and the role they play in forest ecosystems.Therefore, in this study, we conducted forest surveys at 19 locations in the Japanese archipelago, ranging from subtropical to subarctic regions, investigated the distribution of vines, and classified them according to climbing style as an ecological characteristic. We examined the differences.
The results of this survey showed that vines grow abundantly in some forests of the Japanese archipelago, even in cold regions such as subarctic and cool-temperate regions.The main climbing styles were twining climbers and root climbers, each accounting for more than 90% of the total number of stems and total cross-sectional area of the stems.
The abundance and proportion of twining climbers is high in warm areas south of the Japanese archipelago, and similar to results obtained in previous studies in the tropics, a positive relationship between distribution and temperature was observed.On the other hand, this relationship was not observed for root climbers, which tended to be more abundant in snowy areas such as those on the Sea of Japan coast, and their stem density was positively related to the maximum snow depth in the study area.On the other hand, the biomass of Twining climber was negatively related to maximum snow depth.These results revealed that environmental factors have different effects on the distribution of vines with different climbing styles.
This study suggests that changes in the composition of climbing styles of liana communities along environmental gradients may shape functional geographic gradients of liana communities in forests.In addition, in temperate and cold regions, there are fewer species of vines than in the tropics, and the composition of climbing styles is relatively simple. The effectiveness was also proposed.This result is expected to contribute to elucidating the global distribution patterns of vines.
