The last traces of Australia's tropical rainforest, where the southeasterly winds bring rain to the coastal mountains, contain a unique assemblage of plants and animals, some primitive, many that are found nowhere else on earth. And fifteen years ago, they also contained Bill Laurance, a budding ecologist seduced by the nature of the landscape in north Queensland. Laurance isn't your typical scientist: he wears cut-offs instead of white coats, enjoys the occasional food fight, and isn't afraid to speak his mind, even if it gets him into trouble, as it often did in the Australian rainforest...

We live in an increasingly fragmented world, with islands of natural habitat cast adrift in a sea of cleared, burned, logged, polluted, and otherwise altered lands. Nowhere are fragmentation and its devastating effects more evident than in the tropical forests. By the year 2000, more than half of these forests will have been cut, causing increased soil erosion, watershed destabilization, climate degradation, and extinction of as many as 600,000 species.
"Tropical Forest Remnants" provides the best information available to help us
understand, manage, and conserve the remaining...

"Emerging Threats to Tropical Forests" reveals the remarkably diverse panoply of perils to tropical forests and their biota, with particular emphasis on recent dangers. William F. Laurance and Carlos A. Peres identify four categories of emerging threats: those that have only recently appeared, such as the virulent chytrid fungus that is decimating rainforest amphibians throughout the tropical world; those that are growing rapidly in importance, like destructive surface fires; those that are poorly understood, namely global warming and other climatic and atmospheric changes; and environmental...