Fast-forward another sixty years and you might wonder what’s changed when it comes to my own canopy expeditions. For a start, I am sadly bereft of comfortable armchairs from which to observe the goings on of the rainforest and I certainly try to avoid using ladders too. Instead, everything is streamlined to be light-weight, portable, and as safe as is reasonably possible. This all means I can climb faster, with fewer assistants, and cover more ground each day. The result is a drastic increase in spatial data, allowing me to build a far more comprehensive view of the canopy ecosystem than past groups who have used complex contraptions with more limited mobility. While I take the minimalist route to the canopy, other researchers still build platforms and high-tech cranes which allow them to more comprehensively monitor a much smaller area. In the end, it’s all really cool stuff and we need every bit of data we can gather!

In this treetop world of staggering complexity and so many unanswered questions, it can sometimes be difficult to narrow one’s focus to a single point of interest. For me however, I can think of nothing quite so fascinating as the epiphytes that live up there.

Epiphytes are plants that spend their whole lives in the canopy. They are completely isolated from the ground throughout their entire life cycles and are utterly vital to the continued functioning of rainforest ecosystems. Without their ability to store water in the treetops after rainfall, many animals would regularly have to put themselves at risk from predators by making the long and tiring climb down to the forest floor to drink. Some species of epiphyte are known to hold so much water that they can even host frogs in the canopy too, without the need for grounded pools. Their use to the ecosystem goes beyond just water though; they provide habitats for insects, who then subsequently defend their host trees as well as producing enough food to supply up to a third of all bird foraging in some regions of the tropics (Nadkarni & Matelson, 1989).

The value of epiphytes is seemingly endless and yet globally, we still know remarkably little about them the world over. The majority of what we do currently know about epiphytes comes from just a few sites in South and Central America, while other regions remain relatively understudied (Barker & Pinard, 2001). Often, all we really know about epiphytes is that they are important and threatened by forest disturbance through human activities. How though, are we supposed to prioritise their conservation when we can’t know exactly where they are most diverse without long and expensive climbing campaigns to observe them? The answer is: by observing the trees on which they grow and improving our understanding of the epiphyte-host relationship so that we can predict their distributions.

For almost two months, I carried hundreds of metres of rope into the forest with Ben and Asinu, my friends and colleagues who each had specialist expertise in climbing and forest survival. Together we used catapults to launch our climbing gear into the trees and provide us access to the canopy, fifty metres above our heads. Slowly, making sure to watch out for the spiked vines and angry insects whom we were likely to disturb with our presence, we would haul ourselves skywards.

Inch-by-inch as you ascend the rope to the canopy, the rainforest vista becomes more and more impressive. Eventually, and if the tree is tall enough, you can see as a bird might, right the way to the island’s coast in one direction and across to rolling hills of forest in the other. Beneath, you can feel the living sway of the tree as it bends with the wind and in that moment it is hard to not be awed by this hidden world so high above our usual focus as humans.