Rainforests

More than 400 colour pictures illustrate typical natural ecosystems and cultural landscapes. The focus is on the ecological conditions and characteristics that have a particularly strong influence (e.g. fire as an ecological factor, human use of natural resources, physiological adaptations). The aim of the book is to develop a causal understanding of the individual habitats.

This book provides an up-to-date picture of the health of the world’s tropical forests. Claude Martin, an eminent scientist and conservationist, integrates information from remote imaging, ecology, and economics to explain deforestation and forest health throughout the world. He explains how urbanization, an increasingly global economy, and a worldwide demand for biofuels put new pressure on rainforest land.

The Amazon region is the focus of intense conflict between conservationists concerned with deforestation and advocates of agro-industrial development. This book focuses on the contributions of environmental organizations to the preservation of Brazilian Amazonia. It reveals how environmental organizations such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF and others have fought fiercely to stop deforestation in the region.

This is a beautiful and lavishly illustrated book containing 23 personal stories about Africa’s hidden rainforests – the Udzungwa Mountains and the other Eastern Arc Mountains in East Africa. The book is full of fascinating information about new discoveries, evolution, fieldwork and wildlife in these East African forests. 

Globally rainforests are under threat on numerous fronts, yet they have a crucial role in biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation and providing other ecosystem services. Rainforests are also attractive tourist spaces and where they have been used as a tourism resource they have generated significant income for local communities. However, not all use of rainforests as a tourism resource has been sustainable.

An eye-opening tour of the rare and exotic, The Kingdom of Rarities offers us a new understanding of the natural world, one that places rarity at the center of conservation biology.