9625593 Holbrook This Americas Program award will support Dr. Noel M. Holbrook, Harvard College, Cambridge, to visit Caracas, Venezuela to plan a research proposal in collaboration with Dr. Ernesto Medina, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientificas (IVIC), Caracas, Venezuela. The objective of the visit is to plan the development of a collaborative study of tropical plant physiology and plant environmental biology using hemiepiphytic plants as a model system. Hemiepihytes are plants that spend a portion of their life without access to the water and nutrients held in the soil, and part of their life with root connection to the ground. Venezuela is an appropriate study location because of the diversity of hemiepiphytic species found there and the wide range of habitats in which they naturally occur. The purpose of the visit is to select the field areas that will provide the necessary combination of access , protection from human disturbance, and marked seasonality in rainfall for the proposed study. ***
