Andean epiphyte mortality rates

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Epiphytes are weird organisms. In principle, I expected them to be quite sensitive to water shortage and increases in temperature due to their dependency on water and nutrients supply by the external environment (they only use trees as support). If it was the case, epiphytes could be used as perfect indicators of climatic effects on plant population. However, they seem to have evolved and developed a big set of tools to be able to resist exposure to environmental stress. Actually, the highest amount of death epiphyte were caused by external factors, such as branchfall, which was totally again of my initial expectations.

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