Abstract
The structure of the vascular epiphyte community in the overstory (20-28 m) of a riverine tropical rain forest was studied with the aid of a large tower crane between April and December of 1997. The forest is located near Caño Surumoni, a small tributary of the Orinoco River, in Amazonas State, Venezuela. The overstory or upper canopy in the study plot contained 147 trees, representing 16 families and approximately 22 species. Of these trees, 20% bore at least one epiphyte. In this stratum, 243 epiphytic individuals were found, representing seven families and 22 species. The family Orchidaceae presented the greatest number of species (11). Five species, Codonanthe crassifolia (Gesneriaceae), Micro gramma baldwinii (Polypodiaceae), Cattleya violacea (Orchidaceae), Anthurium gracile (Araceae), and Aechmea tillandsioides (Bromeliaceae), represented the highest number of individuals. No apparent relationship existed between any epiphyte in the study and the main architectural features of its phorophyte. A correlation was established, however, between epiphyte abundance and type of tree bark.
Open Access and Copyright Notice
Selbyana is committed to real and immediate open access for academic work. All of Selbyana's articles and reviews are free to access immediately upon publication. There are no author charges (APCs) prior to publication, and no charges for readers to download articles and reviews for their own scholarly use. To facilitate this, Selbyana depends on the financial backing of the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, the hard work and dedication of its editorial team and advisory board, and the continuing support of its network of peer reviewers and partner institutions.
Authors are free to choose which open license they would like to use for their work. Our default license is the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). While Selbyana’s articles can be copied by anyone for noncommercial purposes if proper credit is given, all materials are published under an open-access license with authors retaining full and permanent ownership of their work. The author grants Selbyana a perpetual, non-exclusive right to publish the work and to include it in other aggregations and indexes to achieve broader impact and visibility.
Authors are responsible for and required to ascertain that they are in possession of image rights for any and all photographs, illustrations, and figures included in their work or to obtain publication or reproduction rights from the rights holders. Contents of the journal will be registered with the Directory of Open Access Journals and similar repositories. Authors are encouraged to store their work elsewhere, for instance in institutional repositories or personal websites, including commercial sites such as academia.edu, to increase circulation (see The Effects of Open Access).