Invasive alien species are among today's most daunting environmental threats, costing billions of dollars in economic damages and wreaking havoc on ecosystems around the world. In 1997, a consortium of scientific organizations including SCOPE, IUCN, and CABI developed the Global Invasive Species. Programme (GISP) with the explicit objective of providing new tools for understanding and coping with invasive alien species. Invasive Alien Species is the final report of GISP's first phase of operation, 1997-2000, in which authorities from more than thirty countries worked to examine invasions as a...

The biota of the earth is being altered at an unprecedented rate. We are witnessing wholesale exchanges of organisms among geographic areas that were once totally biologically isolated. We are seeing massive changes in landscape use that are creating even more abundant succes sional patches, reductions in population sizes, and in the worst cases, losses of species. There are many reasons for concern about these trends. One is that we unfortunately do not know in detail the conse quences of these massive alterations in terms of how the biosphere as a whole operates or even, for that matter,...

The climbing habit in plants has apparently evolved numerous times. Species that climb are well represented in habitats ranging from tropical rain forests through temperate forests to semi-deserts. The Biology of Vines, first published in 1992, is a treatment of what is known about climbing plants, written by a group of experts and covering topics ranging from the biomechanics of twining to silvicultural methods for controlling vine infestations. Also included are detailed accounts of climbing plant evolution, stem anatomy and function, climbing mechanics, carbon and water relations,...

Prolonged seasonal drought affects most of the tropics, including vast areas presently or recently dominated by 'dry forests'. These forests have received scant attention, despite the fact that humans have used and changed them more than rain forests. This volume reviews the available information, often making contrasts with wetter forests. The world's dry forest heterogeneity of structure and function is shown regionally. In the neotropics, biogeographic patterns differ from those of wet forests, as does the spectrum of plant life-forms in terms of structure, physiology, phenology and...

Our knowledge of the functional characteristics of the plants of mediterranean-cl imate regions has increased greatly in the past decade. In recent times the possibility of large-scale util ization of biomass for energy from these regions has been proposed. In order to assess the feasibil ity of these proposals we must consider the productive structure of these plant communities and how they vary through time and space. This symposium was an attempt to examine our recently acquired basic knowledge of the environmental I imitations on the productivity of Mediterranean plant communities in...

The diversity of the earth's climates superimposed upon a complex configuration of physical features has provided the conditions for the evolution of a remarkable array of living things which are linked together into complex ecosystems. The kinds of organisms comprising the ecosystems of the world, and the nature of their interactions, have constantly changed through time due to coevolutionary interactions along with the effects of a continually changing physical environ- ment. In recent evolutionary time there has been a dramatic and ever-accelerating rate of change in the configuration of...

Harold A. Mooney and Richard J. Hobbs At present there is enormous concern about the changes that are occurring on the surface of the earth and in the earth's atmosphere, primarily as a result of human activities. These changes, particularly in the atmosphere, have the potential for altering the earth's habitability. International pro- grams unprecedented in scope, including the International Geosphere- Biosphere Program, have been initiated to describe and understand these changes. The global change program will call for coordinated measure- ments on a global scale of those interactive...

No other disjunct pieces of land present such striking similarities as the widely sepa- 1 rated regions with a mediterranean type of climate, that is, the territories fringing the Mediterranean Sea, California, Central Chile and the southernmost strips of South Mrica and Australia. Similarities are not confined to climatic trends, but are also reflected in the physiognomy ofthe vegetation, in land use patterns and frequently in the general appearance of the landscape. The very close similarities in agricultural practices and sometimes also in rural settlements are dependent on the climatic...

capable of providing at least a relative measure of stomatal aperture were first used shortly thereafter (Darwin and Pertz, 1911). The Carnegie Institution of Washington's Desert Research Laboratory in Tucson from 1905 to 1927 was the first effort by plant physiologists and ecologists to conduct team research on the water relations of desert plants. Measurements by Stocker in the North African deserts and Indonesia (Stocker, 1928, 1935) and by Lundegardh (1922) in forest understories were pioneering attempts to understand the environmental controls on photosynthesis in the field. While these...