Integrative and Comparative Biology Advance Access originally published online on August 20, 2007
Integrative and Comparative Biology 2007 47(6):893-894; doi:10.1093/icb/icm087
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Book Review |
Emerging Threats to Tropical Forests. William F. Laurance and Carlos A. Peres, editors.
Biology and Environmental Studies
New College of Florida
E-mail: Canopymeg{at}aol.com
Emerging Threats to Tropical Forests. William F. Laurance and Carlos A. Peres, editors.
Chicago, Il: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. 520 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-47021-1 (cloth) $110.00, ISBN 978-0-226-47022-4, (paper) $40.00.
"By any measure, tropical forests continue to be in grave trouble." This introductory sentence, penned by Thomas Lovejoy of the H. John Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, aptly sets the stage for a new volume called "Emerging Threats to Tropical Forests." Edited by William Laurance and Carlos Peres, this book summarizes important twenty-first century threats to the world's tropical rain forests. Two topics in particular, tropical rain forest decline and its synergism with climatic change, are of enormous concern to both the professional scientist as well as any informed layperson. The editors have compiled a "must-read" volume for any biologist, geographer, informatics expert, conservationist, or concerned citizen. Ideally, the book should be on the shelf of all policy makers, especially those involved with environmental issues.
Divided into six sections, the book dissects different threats to tropical rain forests, including (1) climatic and atmospheric change, (2) synergistic impacts of simultaneous environmental changes, (3) pathogens and invaders, (4) insidious and poorly understood threats, (5) solving and mitigating emerging threats, and (6) summary and implications. Bill Laurance, considered in most circles as a relatively young conservation biologist, provides his own sobering timeline of tropical destruction by stating that only 1.5 billion people existed on earth when his grandfather was born—This fact in itself illustrates the rapidity of global change in the twentieth century. Both Laurance and Perez are at the forefront of tropical conservation biology and have woven an articulate albeit depressing tapestry. The current levels of degradation of tropical forests are threatening their functional machinery, and this book hopes to stimulate awareness before forest degradation reaches a point of no return.
The strengths of the book are 3-fold. It is worth buying simply for the literature list alone. It also provides an excellent synthesis of the synergistic threats to tropical rain forests, with up-to-date case studies and summaries. And its organization with chapter summaries, section summaries, and an excellent solutions/conclusion section, allows a busy policy maker to grasp the major messages without hours of exhaustive reading.
The editors sought a group of luminaries for their chapters. In the first section on the impacts of global change, authors explain clearly how the tropical rain forests serve as an important carbon sink, but they warn about possible surprises and unexpected outcomes as human activities continue to alter ecosystems over enormous scales of time and space. Williams and Hebert summarize some frightening predicted extinction rates in montane regions of the Australian tropics. They predict significant losses of endemic species as increased temperatures force animals to move higher up the slopes of North Queensland. Case studies for subtropical Africa, the Amazon, and Uganda round out the section on the emerging threats of climatic change to tropical forests.
Part 2, about synergistic effects of simultaneous environmental changes, is perhaps the most revealing section. The editors introduce this section by saying, "As scientists and conservation managers, we are often trained to seek simplicity—to focus on a single environmental change and assess its consequences in painstaking detail... . Reality is rarely so clear-cut. Few landscapes and species are subjected to just one type of environmental change; most are reeling from a whole array of anthropogenic alterations, some of which operate in concert." Good case studies include the potential exacerbation of fire with forest fragmentation, the fate of vertebrates in fragmented landscapes, and rising human pressures on nature reserves. The case study of Bwindi Park in Uganda was especially disheartening because the attempts for environmental management of limited resources appear to have failed, in the authors’ views.
Part 3 reviews the impacts of emerging pathogens and invaders. Catastropic die-offs of stream-dwelling rain forest frogs is one alarming example of an emerging and insidious threat to ecosystems already stressed by fragmentation, fires, climatic change, and human exploitation. Other chapters include plant diseases, loss of gorillas and chimpanzees in Africa from Ebola and hunting, and a possible explanation for the decline of the "dodo tree" from the pressure of invasive species. The fate of fragmented tropical forests appears to hang in the balance, due to the unpredictable pressures by invasives. Part 4 encompasses a growing panoply of challenges to forest integrity: roads, seed dispersal, surface fires, forest cover, and the role of governance with regard to conservation. Fearnside's review of mitigation of climatic change in the Amazon should be a "must-read" for all ecology students.
Perhaps the most important section focuses on solutions to emerging threats. All authors agree that conservation is admittedly drastically underfunded, but creative solutions still seem to elude our grasp. Suggestions involving ecotourism or bold initiatives to set aside 50% of all tropical countries for conservation are admirable, but continue to represent talk rather than action. Perhaps a sequel is in order, whereby some creative economists and ecologists can create scenarios where scientists, citizens, and policy makers are provided with pathways for future stewardship of tropical forests. I plan to use this book in teaching conservation biology, and perhaps ask my students to write the sequel.
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