Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii INTRODUCTION 1 Chapter 1: What and Where Are the Tropics? 6 Chapter 2: Biogeography and Evolution in the Tropics 38 Chapter 3: Inside Tropical Rain Forests: Structure 79 Chapter 4: Inside Tropical Rain Forests: Biodiversity 109 Chapter 5: A Study in Biodiversity: Rain Forest Tree Species Richness 154 Chapter 6: A Shifting Mosaic: Rain Forest Development and Dynamics 188 Chapter 7: Biotic Interactions and Coevolution in Tropical Rain Forests 227 Chapter 8: Trophic Dynamics in Evolutionary Context 272 Chapter 9: Carbon Flux and Climate Change in Tropical Ecosystems 323 Chapter 10: Nutrient Cycling and Tropical Soils 359 Chapter 11: Tropical Savannas and Dry Forests 390 Chapter 12: Other Tropical Ecosystems: From the Mountains to the Rivers to the Sea 422 Chapter 13: Humans as Part of Tropical Ecosystems: Focus on the Neotropics 469 Chapter 14: Forest Fragmentation and Biodiversity 500 Chapter 15: Conservation Outlook for the Tropics 530 APPENDIX: GEOLOGIC TIME CHART 565 LITERATURE CITED 566 ILLUSTRATION CREDITS 594 INDEX 606

About the Author

John Kricher is professor of biology at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. His books include The Balance of Nature: Ecology's Enduring Myth and A Neotropical Companion (both Princeton).

Reviews

"Overall, an ideal resource for a tropical ecology course ..."--Choice "Tropical Ecology provides a superb introduction to the tropics. Kricher does a remarkable job at bringing together an enormous amount of information and presenting it in an accessible but rigorous way. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and certainly recommend it."--John G. Blake, Biotropica "[A]n excellent college text ... it will become my tropical ecology shelf resource."--Wildlife Activist "Tropical Ecology has 15 chapters and is broadly organized into four sections: a large section dealing with biodiversity in tropical rain forests, a section on productivity and nutrient cycling, a section on other ecosystems in the tropics, and a final section on human ecology in the tropics, including relevant issues in conservation. The first chapter gives an overview of tropical ecology, providing a nice background on the rich history of tropical fieldwork including that of Darwin, Wallace, and Humboldt. It provides a useful synopsis of the advances in tropical ecology over the years. It further gives a nice overview of all the biomes around the world, and a wonderfully succinct and accessible summary of the climatic processes that create the global diversity in biomes... In general ... Kricher was successful in convincing the reader about the unique contributions of tropical ecology to our understanding of ecological processes, especially to our understanding of how biodiversity is generated and maintained. This textbook is a wonderful starting point or reference for students and those generally interested in learning more about tropical ecology."--Ecology "Tropical Ecology by John Kricher unifies both perspectives to a great textbook. While reviewing the different conceptual angels that are necessary to grasp the ecology of the world's tropics, many well-chosen examples illustrate the need to be aware of countless 'descriptive' facts and phenomena before theories can be used to explain them. By viewing topics from many different angles (such as climate, plant physiology, behaviour, evolution, geology), the book makes clear the multidisciplinarity of understanding tropical ecosystems... I think it is a great dual-purpose book. With its non-technical style, nice colour pictures and graphs, and good didactical organization (e.g., boxes for special case stories; accompanying slides for lecturing on http://press.princeton.edu/links/kricher/) it makes a highly recommended, multidisciplinary textbook for academic teaching. At the same time it can be used as a comprehensive review of the state of the art and as a guide to recent original literature for graduate students and researchers starting new on one of the topics."--Jan Beck, Elsevier "As this textbook follows at the heels of Kricher's successful Neotropical Companion, it is no surprise that the text is clearly written and should be accessible to undergraduate and starting graduate students, the primary target of this text. The textbook is written in a narrative that, despite its length, is easy to digest. Kricher uses approachable examples with clear illustrations, and the text is well organized. As a whole, the textbook is nicely done and should provide a wonderful complement for a course in tropical ecology."--J. Albert C. Uy, Ecological Society of America "The book can be dipped into for an in-depth read on many subjects and it is liberally scattered with colour photographs, graphs and quotes from many current research papers. Overall this is a comprehensive account of the ecology of the neotropics and is highly recommended for students."--John Feltwell, Biologist "I think it is a great dual-purpose book. With its non-technical style, nice colour pictures and graphs, and good didactical organization ... it makes a highly recommended, multidisciplinary textbook for academic teaching. At the same time it can be used as a comprehensive review of the state of the art and as a guide to recent original literature for graduate students and researchers starting new on one of the topics."--Jan Beck, Basic and Applied Ecology "Kricher has written the text in an easy to read style, which makes the study of the subject pleasurable, rather than a chore. Overall, Kricher provides a great text for the beginning and advanced student. I would recommend it as a text for students to obtain a good understanding of the concepts of tropical ecology."--Noel D. Preece, Austral Ecology