Our knowledge of the ecology of tropical rain-forest trees is limited, with detailed information available for perhaps only a few hundred of the many thousand of species that occur. Yet a good understanding of the trees is essential to unravelling the workings of the forest itself. This book aims to summarise contemporary understanding of the ecology of tropical rain-forest trees. The emphasis is on comparative ecology, an approach that can help to identify possible adaptive trends and evolutionary constraints and which may also lead to a workable ecological classification for tree species, conceptually simplifying the rain-forest community and making it more amenable to analysis.
Since the first edition ofthis book was written, public awareness oftropical rain forests has become so great that issues involving their exploitation are the stuffofdaily newspapers, radio and...
It is a privilege to be asked and a pleasurable duty for me to write the foreword of this book. The conservation and wise utilisation of the humid tropical forests, a unique biome, are matters of...