Tropical Forests and Global Atmospheric Change

Tropical forests represent the world's most biodiverse ecosystems and play a key role in hydrology, carbon storage and exchange. Many of the human-induced pressures these regions are facing, e.g. fragmentation and deforestation, have been widely reported and well documented. However, there have been surprisingly few efforts to synthesize cutting-edge science in the area of tropical forest interaction with atmospheric change. At a time when our global atmosphere is undergoing a period of rapid change, both in terms of climate and in the cycling of essential elements such as carbon and nitrogen, a thorough and up-to-date analysis is now timely. This research level text, suitable for graduate level students as well as professional researchers in plant ecology, tropical forestry, climate change science, and conservation biology, explores the vigorous contemporary debate as to how rapidly tropical forests may be affected by atmospheric change, and what this may mean for their future.

Yadvinder Malhi is a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, UK, and Honorary Research Fellow, Institute of the Atmosphere and Biosphere, School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, UK. Oliver Phillips is Reader in Tropical Ecology in the Earth and Biosphere Institute, School of Geography, University of Leeds, UK, and Visiting Researcher at the Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, USA. He was awarded the British Ecological Society's 'Founder Prize' in 2004 for outstanding early career ecological research.