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Humans have used resources from their environment for food and shelter for millions of years. Over time, however, human activities have extensively impacted Earth's ecosystems. Rain forests are one of a number of ecosystems on Earth that have been negatively affected by human activities. This book explores the different ways humans have impacted the plants and animals that call rain forest environments home. Full-color photographs depict harmful human activities and conservation efforts while fact boxes and sidebars provide readers with additional information about how rain forest environments have changed since the dawn of the human race.
Author : Mark B. Bush Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media Page : 427 pages File Size : 48,96 MB Release : 2007 Category : Nature ISBN : 3540239081
The goal of this book is to provide a current overview of the impacts of climate change on tropical forests, to investigate past, present, and future climatic influences on the ecosystems with the highest biodiversity on the planet.Tropical Rainforest Responses to Climatic Change will be the first book to examine how tropical rain forest ecology is altered by climate change, rather than simply seeing how plant communities were altered. Shifting the emphasis onto ecological processes e.g. how diversity is structured by climate and the subsequent impact on tropical forest ecology, provides the reader with a more comprehensive coverage. A major theme of this book that emerges progressively is the interaction between humans, climate and forest ecology. While numerous books have appeared dealing with forest fragmentation and conservation, none have explicitly explored the long term occupation of tropical systems, the influence of fire and the future climatic effects of deforestation, coupled with anthropogenic emissions. Incorporating modelling of past and future systems paves the way for a discussion of conservation from a climatic perspective, rather than the usual plea to stop logging.
Rainforests have long been recognized as hotspots of biodiversity--but they are crucial for our planet in other surprising ways. Not only do these fascinating ecosystems thrive in rainy regions, they create rain themselves, and this moisture is spread around the globe. Rainforests across the world have a powerful and concrete impact, reaching as far as America's Great Plains and central Europe. In Rainforest: Dispatches from Earth's Most Vital Frontlines, a prominent conservationist provides a comprehensive view of the crucial roles rainforests serve, the state of the world's rainforests today, and the inspirational efforts underway to save them. In Rainforest, Tony Juniper draws upon decades of work in rainforest conservation. He brings readers along on his journeys, from the thriving forests of Costa Rica to Indonesia, where palm oil plantations have supplanted much of the former rainforest. Despite many ominous trends, Juniper sees hope for rainforests and those who rely upon them, thanks to developments like new international agreements, corporate deforestation policies, and movements from local and Indigenous communities. As climate change intensifies, we have already begun to see the effects of rainforest destruction on the planet at large. Rainforest provides a detailed and wide-ranging look at the health and future of these vital ecosystems. Throughout this evocative book, Juniper argues that in saving rainforests, we save ourselves, too.
Views on the dynamics of tropical forests are changing rapidly with the recognition that their environment is variable on the decadal to century scale. Fluctuating climatic conditions partly determine tropical forest structure, species composition and dynamics. Tropical communities are also highly contingent in space and time with respect to site and historical factors. Tropical forests have experienced to some degree this disturbance regime in the past, but climatologists are now predicting increasingly frequent extreme events in the new century. The combination of increasing deforestation and land-use conversion by man plus an increasingly variable environment means a situation that could be very difficult to manage.
Climate change represents one of the most alarming long-term threats to ecosystems the world over. This new collection of papers provides, for the first time, an overview of the potentially serious impact that climate change may have on tropical forests. The authors, a multi-disciplinary group of leading experts in climatology, forestry, ecology and conservation biology, present a state-of-knowledge snapshot of how tropical forests are likely to react to the changes being wrought on our planet's atmosphere and climate. Tropical forests represent extraordinary harbours for biological diversity, and yet as deforestation and degradation continue apace, they are under greater pressure from human impacts than ever before. Climate change adds yet another threat to these valuable ecosystems, and this volume demonstrates just how significant a problem this may really be. The authors identify certain types of forest, including tropical montane cloud forest that may be particularly vulnerable. They also show the strong likelihood of global warming aggravating problems in already fragmented forest areas.
This updated and expanded second edition of a much lauded work provides a current overview of the impacts of climate change on tropical forests. The authors also investigate past, present and future climatic influences on the ecosystems with the highest biodiversity on the planet. Tropical Rainforest Responses to Climatic Change, Second Edition, looks at how tropical rain forest ecology is altered by climate change, rather than simply seeing how plant communities were altered. Shifting the emphasis on to ecological processes, e.g. how diversity is structured by climate and the subsequent impact on tropical forest ecology, provides the reader with a more comprehensive coverage. A major theme of the book is the interaction between humans, climate and forest ecology. The authors, all foremost experts in their fields, explore the long term occupation of tropical systems, the influence of fire and the future climatic effects of deforestation, together with anthropogenic emissions. Incorporating modelling of past and future systems paves the way for a discussion of conservation from a climatic perspective, rather than the usual plea to stop logging. This second edition provides an updated text in this rapidly evolving field. The existing chapters are revised and updated and two entirely new chapters deal with Central America and the effect of fire on wet forest systems. In the first new chapter, the paleoclimate and ecological record from Central America (Lozano, Correa, Bush) is discussed, while the other deals with the impact of fire on tropical ecosystems. It is hoped that Jonathon Overpeck, who has been centrally involved in the 2007 and 2010 IPCC reports, will provide a Foreword to the book.
not only for land use systems that depend on the regular supply of rain or irrigation water but also for the future development of natural rainforests as drought stress has been shown to a?ect tree growth and species composition in old-growth forests (Wright 1991, Walsh and Newbery 1999, Engelbrecht et al. 2007). A drought experiment conducted in a cacao agroforestry plantation showed that this plantation was surprisingly resilient to an induced drought of more than a year (Schwendenmann et al. 2009). However, droughts can have a strong impact on household incomes from agriculture, they strongly a?ect the vulnerability to poverty and thus have to be analyzed as important exogenous shocks to households, forcing them to adjust their behaviour and develop strategies to cope with these problems. The stability of rainforest margins is a critical factor in the protection of tropical rainforests (Tscharntke et al. 2007). At present, however, rainf- est margins in many parts of the tropics are far from stable, both in soc- economic and in ecological terms. For example, protected areas may attract, rather than repel, human settlement, which may be due to international donor investment in national conservation programs (Wittemeyer et al. 2008). An alternative hypothesis is that protected areas might be compromised if leakage takes place, that is, if impacts that would take place inside the restricted area are displaced to a nearby, undisturbed area (Ewers and Rodrigues 2008).
The continuing devastation of the world’s tropical rain forest affects us all—spurring climate change, decimating biodiversity, and wrecking our environment’s resiliency. Millions of worried people around the world want to do whatever it takes to save the forest that is left. But halting rain forest destruction means understanding what is driving it. In Breakfast of Biodiversity, John Vandermeer and Ivette Perfecto insightfully describe the ways in which such disparate factors as the international banking system, modern agricultural techniques, rain forest ecology, and the struggles of the poor interact to bring down the forest. They weave an alternative vision in which democracy, sustainable agriculture, and land security for the poor are at the center of the movement to save the tropical environment.
Regional intercomparisons between ecosystems on different continents can be a powerful tool to better understand the ways in which ecosystems respond to global change. Large areas are often needed to characterize the causal mechanisms governing interactions between ecozones and their environments. Factors such as weather and climate patterns, land-ocean and land-atmosphere interactions all play important roles. As a result of the strong physical north-south symmetry between the western coasts of North and South America, the similarities in climate, coastal oceanography and physiography between these two regions have been extensively documented. High Latitude Rain Forests and Associated Ecosystems of the West Coast of the Americas presents current research on West Coast forest and river ecology, and compares ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest with those of South America.