During 1999, the eastern portion of Vancouver Island, British Columbia began experiencing an outbreak of a rare cryptococcal disease previously known to exist only in tropical and sub-tropical regions. It is thought that this outbreak on Vancouver Island is the world’s largest outbreak of cryptococcosis ever identified. It is not yet understood how this pathogen, widely regarded as a “tropical”...

Fungal endophytes, ubiquitous among terrestrial plants, are especially abundant and diverse in asymptomatic foliage of tropical trees and shrubs_ As such, tropical endophytes are wjdely thought to comprise an important component of fl.!ngalbiodiversity at a global scale. Yet, neither the diversity of endophytes associated with even a single individual plant, nor the potential importance of host...

Plants play an important, but often insufficiently recognized. role in human societies, chiefly as providers of food, feed, and fiber, but for other uses as well such as drugs and building materials. In those cases where demand for a particular plant product exceed natural supply, humans initiated cultivation of those plants 10,000 years ago, resulting in the domestication of a limited number o...

The functional role of herbivores in tropical rainforests remains poorly understood. We quantified the magnitude of, and underlying controls on, carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycled by invertebrate herbivory along a 2800 m elevational gradient in the tropical Andes spanning 12°C mean annual temperature. We find, firstly, that leaf area loss is greater at warmer sites with lower foliar phospho...

The response of tropical forests to global warming is one of the largest uncertainties in predicting the future carbon balance of Earth. To determine the likely effects of elevated temperatures on tropical forest understory plants and soils, as well as other ecosystems, an infrared (IR) heater system was developed to provide in situ warming for the Tropical Responses to Altered Climate Experime...

Bach Ma National Park, situated in central Vietnam, 40km southeast of Hue and 65km northwest of Da Nang, is one of the eleven national parks in the country. The national park was created in 1991 to conserve the only green transect left in Vietnam, stretching from the South China Sea to the border with Laos. The dominant habitats are tropical evergreen monsoon forest in the lowland areas and sub...

Tropical forests represent a major atmospheric carbon dioxide sink. Here the gross primary productivity (GPP) response of tropical rainforests to climate engineering via marine sky brightening under a future scenario is investigated in three Earth systemmodels. The model response is diverse, and in two of the three models, the tropical GPP shows a decrease from the marine sky brightening climat...

BACKGROUND The Tehuacán Valley is one of the areas of Mesoamerica with the oldest history of plant management. Homegardens are among the most ancient management systems that currently provide economic benefits to people and are reservoirs of native biodiversity. Previous studies estimated that 30% of the plant richness of homegardens of the region are native plant species from wild populations....

Sri Lanka, teardrop of India, besides being the largest exporter of tea (Camellia sinensis), in the world, has varied tropical terrain where many medicinal plants are collected from the wild and are cultivated. In a short-term, recently completed, focused training program, farmers’ societies met with field officers and professionals to share information and learn more about how to grow, harvest...

Snakebite has been a major cause of mortality across the tropical countries including Indian subcontinent. The present review deals with the enormous amount of ethnobotanical work performed in the last few years involving use of different plants against snakebite in Indian subcontinent (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal). From a variety of literature sources the data has been compiled menti...