Preface

Humans are transforming the earth. Never before have the world’s economic and ecological systems been so closely interconnected, never before ahs our vulnerable planetary home been subjected to so many outrageous abuses. Problems like global warming, pollution of the oceans, ozone depletion, and declining biodiversity reveal an unprecedented increase in the pace, scale, and complexity of our multifarious and far flung interactions will the natural world. We are all affected by such problems, and one of the major challenges facing the international community is how to devise management strategies for the sustainable development of the planet.

Another global issue that has attracted much popular and scientific interest in recent years is tropical earth, and few processes are likely to have more dramatic evidence of our ability to transform the face of the earth, and few processes are likely to have more profound biological consequences. Humans have been altering and removing the earth’s forest cover for millennia, but nothing in that long history matches the current pace of forest destruction in the humid tropics.

The great blocks of forest that straddle the equator in the Americas, Africa, and the Asiatic tropics are the most complex and exuberant expression of the earth’s green mantle. Although they include many different forest formations, it is possible to divide them into two broad categories; tropical rain forest of the ever wet tropics and tropical seasonal forest of the seasonally dry tropics. The sum of the two categories is now generally called tropical moist forest.

Although they clothe only some five per sent of the land surface tropical most forest are believed species of organisms. That we posses only a very incomplete inventory of life on the earth reflects in large part how little we know about tropical forests. Much will remain for eve unknown, because each year a vast area of forest is converted to other uses. As the forest vanish as, quite literally, they go up in smoke so too do countless spices of organisms. Current trends threaten to expunge much of the remarkable cornucopia of tropical life. The process is irreversible extinction is for ever.