XVI International Botanical Congess
The Tambopata region of the southern Peruvian Amazon supports a high diversity of both woody plants and forest types. Wood collected from low riverside vegetation, floodplain forest growing on a low terrace, clay-soil forest on upper terrace, sandy-soil forest, and swamp forest provides an opportunity to test for significant differences in quantitative anatomical characters among forest types. Wood specific gravity and vessel-element length show such differences, whereas fiber length and vessel diameter and density do not. This analysis distinguishes characters that provide information about local environments from those that may be responding to overall climate controls. The high degree of variability in the quantitative characters shows the importance of adequate sample sizes in characterizing either living or fossil assemblages.