Future climate‐change effects on plant growth are most effectively studied using microclimate‐manipulation experiments, the design of which has seen much advance in recent years. For tropical forests, however, such experiments are particularly hard to install and have hence not been widely used. We present a system of active heating and CO2 fertilization for use in tropical forest understoreys, where passive heating is not possible. The system was run for 2 years to study climate‐change effects on epiphytic bryophytes, but is also deemed suitable to study other understorey plants. Warm air and CO2 addition were applied in 1.6‐m‐tall, 1.2‐m‐diameter hexagonal open‐top chambers and the microclimate in the chambers compared to outside air. Warming was regulated with a feedback system while CO2 addition was fixed. The setup successfully heated the air by 2.8 K and increased CO2 by 250 ppm on average, with +3 K and +300 ppm as the targets. Variation was high, especially due to technical breakdowns, but not biased to times of the day or year. In the warming treatment, absolute humidity slightly increased but relative humidity dropped by between 6% and 15% (and the vapor pressure deficit increased) compared to ambient, depending on the level of warming achieved in each chamber. Compared to other heating systems, the chambers provide a realistic warming and CO2 treatment, but moistening the incoming air would be needed to avoid drying as a confounding factor. The method is preferable over infrared heating in the radiation‐poor forest understorey, particularly when combined with CO2 fertilization. It is suitable for plant‐level studies, but ecosystem‐level studies in forests may require chamber‐less approaches like infrared heating and free‐air CO2 enrichment. By presenting the advantages and limitations of our approach, we aim to facilitate further climate‐change experiments in tropical forests, which are urgently needed to understand the processes determining future element fluxes and biodiversity changes in these ecosystems.

Climate change is a mounting global issue, but its consequences will be variable across regions. Tropical species are hypothesized to have reduced climatic adaptability and plasticity. Yet, relative to temperate species, less is understood about how they will respond to climate change. Rising temperature and atmospheric CO 2 could impact plant-herbivore systems directly by altering species traits or abundances, or the effects could be indirect by altering the strength and direction of the relationships that govern organismal strategies and interactions. Using open-top chambers in a Neotropical wet forest, we applied a full-factorial combination of active warming and CO 2 fertilization to investigate the above-ground, short-term effects of climate change on plant-herbivore interactions in a common Neotropical shrub, Piper gener alense. We aimed to answer two main questions: (1) Could climate change alter plantherbivore systems through direct effects on plant growth rate, chemical defense, and/or insect herbivore damage rate? and (2) Could climate change affect plantherbivore systems indirectly by altering (a) the strength of plant resource allocation trade-offs between growth and defense or (b) the effectiveness of plant chemicaldefense against herbivory? None of the microclimate treatments had direct effects on plant growth, chemical defense, or herbivore damage. However, we did observe a positive relationship between growth and chemical defense in treatments mimicking climate-change conditions, which partially supports the growth-differentiation balance hypothesis. We did not detect any effects of treatments on the effectiveness of plant chemical defense against herbivory. It appears that, in this system, increased CO 2 concentration and temperature may cause indirect, cascading consequences, even where direct effects are not observable. We recommend more climate-change experiments addressing multi-trophic interactions that focus not only on the direct responses of organisms but also on the ways in which climate change can restructure the relationships that govern complex biotic systems.