Tropical forests (and all other forests) have suffered enormous damage in recent decades. If the current rate of forest clearance in the tropics (estimated to be 150 000–250 000 km per year) continues, they will disappear as a major, large-scale ecosystem in many countries during the 21st century. As a result, a chain of environmental problems, including increased soil erosion, damage to water ...

Five anthropogenic drivers--land use change, wood extraction, hunting, atmospheric change, climate change--will largely determine the future of tropical forests. The geographic scope and intensity of these five drivers are in flux. Contemporary land use change includes deforestation (approximately 64,000 km(2) yr(-1) for the entire tropical forest biome) and natural forests regenerating on aban...

In 1966 Eugene P. Odum delivered a speech before the Ecological Society of America that transformed the way ecologists looked at succession. His comparison of mature and successional systems lead ecologists to place secondary forests in an inferior position relative to mature ones to the point that today, prominent tropical biologists argue for and against the conservation value of secondary fo...

The genus Quercus is one of the most important clades of woody angiosperms in the northern hemisphere in terms of species diversity, ecological dominance, and economic value. Oaks are dominant members of a wide variety of habitats, including temperate deciduous forest, temperate and subtropical evergreen forest, subtropical and tropical savannah, subtropical woodland, oak-pine forest, oak-’piño...

Within-stand species richness of tropical rain forests is typically high, so that it is not unusual for more than 200 species, including more than 100 tree species, to coexist within 1 ha of tropical rain forest (Whitmore, 1984; Gentry, 1988). However, not all tropical forests have high species richness. Forests growing in suboptimal environments can have reduced richness of higher plants, some...

Tropical forests play a major role in determining the current atmospheric concentration of CO2, as both sources of CO2 following deforestation and sinks of CO2 probably resulting from CO2 stimulation of forest photosynthesis. Recently, researchers have tried to quantify this role. The results suggest that both the carbon sources and sinks in tropical forests are significantly greater than previ...

Recently the number of contingent valuation studies conducted in developing countries has increased. Many have been done to value access to clean water, but there are still very few applications to tropical forest resources. In light of the fact that tropical forests cover a mere 7% of the earth’s land surface, yet provide estimates of up to half the world’s biota, there is a distinct need for ...

Fossil and phylogenetic evidence indicates legume-rich modern tropical forests replaced Late Cretaceous palm-dominated tropical forests across four continents during the early Cenozoic (58-42 Ma). Tropical legume trees can transform ecosystems via their ability to fix dinitrogen (N2) and higher leaf N compared with non-legumes (35-65%), but it is unclear how their evolutionary rise contributed ...

Paradoxically, symbiotic dinitrogen (N2 ) fixers are abundant in nitrogen (N)-rich, phosphorus (P)-poor lowland tropical rain forests. One hypothesis to explain this pattern states that N2 fixers have an advantage in acquiring soil P by producing more N-rich enzymes (phosphatases) that mineralise organic P than non-N2 fixers. We assessed soil and root phosphatase activity between fixers and non...