That's the better link to use for this anyway. It's open access so no reason not to go to the source.
It appears to be heavily statistical and based on scraping many studies for a meta analysis.
"Our meta-analysis resulted in 505 effect sizes (ES) extracted from 39 unique studies (Figure 2). An initial exploratory analysis following the vote counting approach showed a general trend of increasing liana prevalence throughout the tropics is evinced by 333 positive ES (66%) compared to 172 ES (34%) with decreasing or stable trends. After grouping ES per life stage and aggregating the results reported at the species level, 155 ES and their respective standard errors (SE) were obtained. The general increasing pattern and its geographical coverage hold for the reduced dataset, with 112 ES (72%) showing an increasing trend."
The original research just says "Global increase of lianas in tropical forests", the addition of "from space" is to get clicks here.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.17485
That's the better link to use for this anyway. It's open access so no reason not to go to the source.
It appears to be heavily statistical and based on scraping many studies for a meta analysis.
"Our meta-analysis resulted in 505 effect sizes (ES) extracted from 39 unique studies (Figure 2). An initial exploratory analysis following the vote counting approach showed a general trend of increasing liana prevalence throughout the tropics is evinced by 333 positive ES (66%) compared to 172 ES (34%) with decreasing or stable trends. After grouping ES per life stage and aggregating the results reported at the species level, 155 ES and their respective standard errors (SE) were obtained. The general increasing pattern and its geographical coverage hold for the reduced dataset, with 112 ES (72%) showing an increasing trend."