1: Tropical Rain Forests: Myths and Inspirations SECTION I - The Natural Heritage 2: An Exuberance of Plant Life 3: The Great Unseen: Fungi and Microorganisms 4: More than Monkeys: the Vertebrates 5: The Little Things: Invertebrates SECTION II - Origins, Patterns, and Processes 6: From the Beginning: Origins and Transformation 7: Many Rain Forests: Formations and Ecotones 8: So Many Species, so Many Theories 9: Processes and Cycles 10: Plant Form and Function: What it Takes to Survive 11: The Ever Changing Forest: Disturbance and Dynamics 12: The Bloomin' Rainforests: How Flowering Plants Reproduce 13: Nature's Society: Life's Interactions SECTION III - Our Future Legacy 14: Forests in the Anthropocene 15: People of the Forest: Livelihoods and Welfare 16: Biodiversity in a Changing World 17: A Matter for Scientists and Society: Conserving Forested Landscapes 18: Requiem or Revival Bibliography Index
Jaboury Ghazoul's first encounter with tropical rain forests in
1993 was a prolonged one, spending one year living rough in the
forests of Vietnam where his scientific subjects were disturbingly
close. It was during this year that he learnt to distinguish the
sound of a chainsaw from the call of a cicada. Imbued with such
knowledge and confidence, he began to study the reproductive
ecology of plants in the context of land use change, working in
Thailand and Costa
Rica, employed by the Center for International Forestry Research
and the Natural History Museum, London. Since joining Imperial
College London in 1998, and ETH Zurich from 2005, he has expanded
his
research interests to encompass a variety of issues relating to
tropical plant ecology, genetics and conservation. He generally
selects nice places to work, and is thus currently engaged in
research in India, Malaysia and the Seychelles. Douglas Sheil spent
the first three years of his life in Nigeria. He returned to the
tropics several times as a Natural Sciences student in Cambridge,
before gaining a Masters Degree in Forestry and its relation to
Land use from Oxford in 1989. He worked in East Africa for two
years before returning to Oxford to complete his doctorate
examining long-term dynamics of Ugandan rainforests in 1996. From
1998 to 2008 he worked for the Center for International Forest
Research in Indonesia - where he
was for a time the only staff ecologist. His work has taken him to
all the main rain forest regions of the World. He is now director
of the Institute of Tropical Forest Conservation (ITFC), a
field
station under the Mbarara University of Science and Technology,
located in the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, in South West
Uganda - a site famed for its mountain gorillas. His publications
have covered a wide range of tropical forest topics. Current
research includes ecology, conservation and human needs.
Any attempt to write a comprehensive account of all tropical rain
forests represents a major commitment in time and expertise and
both can be found in this volume. It contains a wealth of valuable
information and difficult topics such as competitive exclusion are
well discussed.
*Janet Sprent, Bulletin of the British Ecological Society*
The book is a useful synthesis of a vast array of information.
*The Biologist*
Without exception, we all enjoyed this book and felt it was quite
an achievement; most readers will be satisfied and challenged by
it.
*Plant Science Bulletin*
I congratulate the authors for a book that, although technical in
nature, reminds us of what we are beginning to understand about the
tropical rainforests and inspires even the world-weary to continue
the battle to conserve these most diverse of terrestrial systems
for their inherent biodiversity value,
*Trends in Ecology and Evolution*
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