Coral reef ecosystems are among the most biologically diverse ecosystems on the planet. In addition to their value in terms of biodiversity, coral reefs provide food and resources for over 500 million people. Despite their importance, coral reefs are declining at a rapid rate (1–2% per year) as a result of a range of local (e.g., overexploitation of fisheries, declining water quality) and globa...

Global ocean temperatures rapidly warmed by ~5°C during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM; ~56 million years ago). Extratropical sea surface temperatures (SSTs) met or exceeded modern subtropical values. With these warm extratropical temperatures, climate models predict tropical SSTs >35°C-near upper physiological temperature limits for many organisms. However, few data are available t...

Bird flocks associated with dolphins in the eastern tropical Pacific are described from observations obtained during eight cruises that took place from January to March of 1976, 1977, 1979, and 1980. In the northern tropical waters between latitudes 5”N and 30”N, 43% to 53% of bird flocks co-occurred with dolphins. In equatorial and southern subtropical waters between latitudes 5”N to 12”s and ...

The long-term trend in tropical forest area receives less scrutiny than the tropical deforestation rate. We show that constructing a reliable trend is difficult and evidence for decline is unclear, within the limits of errors involved in making global estimates. A time series for all tropical forest area, using data from Forest Resources Assessments (FRAs) of the United Nations Food and Agricul...

The warming of coastal oceans due to climate change is increasing the overwinter survival of tropical fishes transported to temperate latitudes by ocean currents. However, the processes governing early post-arrival mortality are complex and can result in minimum threshold temperatures for overwinter survival, which are greater than those predicted based upon physiological temperature tolerances...

Much of this series has covered the weather types experienced in the tropics. Following on from the introduction to tropical climates in Part 1 (Galvin, 2007), this penultimate part describes the major climates and their relationship to the plants and animals of the tropics, including humankind, that have settled in all tropical environments. A map of the climatic zones of the tropics appears a...

Omid GHASHGHAEI, Saeid Reza NOUROLLAHI-FARD*, Mohammad KHALILI, Hamid SHARIFI Department of Pathobiology, School of Veterinary Medicine, Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, Kerman, Iran Department of Pathobiology, Research Center of Tropical and Infectious Diseases, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran Research Center for Modeling in Health, Institute for Futures Studies in Heal...

Historically, the economic cycles in Brazil were, in many ways, taking advantage of the existing abundant natural resources. Vast territory, tropical climate, sunshine, and a relatively good amount of rainfall also contributed for the existence of a complex cosystem indicating an important agricultural potential. First, the use of Brazil trees for dying purposes, then sugarcane plantations alon...

If the young of a dominant species are subjected to disproportionately heavy predation, this, together with a limitation on food, can promote a high species diversity. This is seen among tropical birds, which are simultaneously exposed to both conditions to a far greater degree than are Temperate Zone species. Migration to the Temperate Zones during the spring provides a release from these rest...