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Cooperation or competition: species interactions across environmental gradients 2

Part 2 of 2
Published on March 31, 2026   24 min

A selection of talks on Plant & Animal Sciences

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0:04
Here in this image, we're seeing a type of vegetation-induced micro-climate that is at a much larger scale than, in some ways is easier to imagine. What we're looking at is a satellite image of the Brazilian Amazon, and we're looking at something called popcorn clouds. These popcorn clouds form right above individual trees in the Amazon rainforest, and what's happening is the trees are moving water from the soil, transpiring the water into the atmosphere around them and combined with some cloud seeding aerosols have the capacity to just form these humid cloud structures, so a whole weather system that's formed by the movement of water that's driven by the trees themselves. This is an idea that has gained more popularity in recent years. But if we think about this as a way in which plants modify the climate and then modify the climate that their neighbors are growing in, it can happen at a very large scale, like this.
1:16
In this image, we're just zoomed down into the canopy of that same Amazonian rainforest where we can see this fog layer that's formed in and around these forests, some of which is caused by the movement of water that's coming from the trees themselves. The point here is that these plant communities can create a microclimate that they then live in. Theoretically, this is modifying the survival and persistence of the plants that are living here. We're getting the potential for positive interactions with plant neighbors. At the very least, we're getting this structural change in the environment which forces the species that grow in that environment to either thrive in it or not.

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Cooperation or competition: species interactions across environmental gradients 2

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