Abstract
In this paper we develop the theory of cyclic flats of q-matroids. We show that the cyclic flats, together with their ranks, uniquely determine a q-matroid and hence derive a new q-cryptomorphism. We introduce the notion of Fqm -independence of an Fq -subspace of Fqn and we show that q-matroids generalize this concept, in the same way that matroids generalize the notion of linear independence of vectors over a given field.