Hydraulic traits are important for woody plant functioning and distribution. Associations among hydraulic traits, other leaf and stem traits, and species’ performance are relatively well understood for trees, but remain poorly studied for lianas. We evaluated the coordination among hydraulic efficiency (i.e. maximum hydraulic conductivity), hydraulic safety (i.e. cavitation resistance), a suite of 8 morphological and physiological traits, and species’ abundances for saplings of 24 liana species and 27 tree species in wet tropical forests in Panama.