By Egbert G. Leigh
The tropical wooded area of Panama's Barro Colorado Island is a luxuriant neighborhood of crops and animals, pulsating with lifestyles and providing an excellent view of nature's myriad methods. What does the woodland appear like? How do the actions of this forest's vegetation and animals create a neighborhood? Now, in A Magic internet, photographer Christian Ziegler and ecologist Egbert Leigh invite readers to go into the terrific international of Barro Colorado Island. This booklet presents a special mixture of the mind-blowing images of a picture-book and transparent, authoritative textual content written through an lively scientist who has spent part a life-time attempting to comprehend tropical forests. the pictures supply perspectives of the wooded area and its extraordinary range of population, and convey a number of the actions that provide the woodland its personality and lend constitution to its neighborhood. Drawing on a long time of labor on Barro Colorado Island, Egbert Leigh explains how the woodland works. the pictures and textual content show the numerous methods its vegetation and animals compete with but additionally rely on one another: the contrasts among solitary cats and intricately prepared armies of ants; the various methods vegetation fight for a spot within the sunlight, and the methods those vegetation allure, or cultivate, animals to pollinate their plant life. eventually, the authors express why this, and through implication all different, tropical forests topic to the folk who stay close to them and to the area at huge, what we will examine from those forests, and the way they vary from temperate-zone forests. filled with attractive full-color pictures followed by way of transparent and available textual content, A Magic net is a needs to for an individual making plans to go to a tropical woodland, and for all those that basically want they can.
Read Online or Download A Magic Web: The Forest of Barro Colorado Island PDF
Similar forestry books
Reforesting Landscapes: Linking Pattern and Process (Landscape Series)
The twenty first century has obvious the beginnings of a very good recovery attempt in the direction of the world’s forests, observed via the emergence of an expanding literature on reforestation, regeneration and regrowth of wooded area hide. but thus far, there is not any quantity which synthesises present wisdom at the quantity, developments, styles and drivers of reforestation.
Modelling, Monitoring and Management of Forest Fires II
This booklet includes peer-reviewed papers provided on the moment overseas convention on Modelling, tracking and administration of woodland Fires. geared up by way of the Wessex Institute of know-how, united kingdom, in collaboration with the Politecnico di Torino, Italy, the convention was once. held in Kos, Greece, in June, 2010.
Landscape Boundaries: Consequences for Biotic Diversity and Ecological Flows
The emergence of panorama ecology in the course of the Eighties represents an impor tant maturation of ecological thought. as soon as enamored with the conceptual fantastic thing about well-balanced, homogeneous ecosystems, ecologists now assert that a lot of the essence of ecological platforms lies of their lumpiness. Patches with differing houses and behaviors lie strewn around the land scape, items of the advanced interactions of weather, disturbance, and biotic methods.
Forests in revolutionary France : conservation, community, and conflict 1669-1848
This publication investigates the commercial, strategic, and political significance of forests in early smooth and sleek Europe and indicates how struggles over this important typical source either formed and mirrored the ideologies and results of France's lengthy progressive interval. until eventually the mid-nineteenth century, wooden used to be the central gasoline for cooking and heating and the first fabric for production around the globe and comprised each possible component to commercial, household, army, and maritime job.
- The Ecology and Management of Non-Timber Forest Resources (World Bank Technical Paper)
- Reframing Deforestation: Global Analyses and Local Realities: Studies in West Africa (Global Environmental Change Series)
- Host-Plant Selection by Phytophagous Insects (Contemporary Topics in Entomology)
- Timber Structure, Properties, Conversion and Use
Extra resources for A Magic Web: The Forest of Barro Colorado Island
Sample text
Today, many graduate students, following in their footsteps, sacrifice income and comfort to work in these beautiful forests. In the New World, as in Madagascar, the grim and devastating trade in endangered species is fueled by fascination with the wonders of tropical nature: orchids with their many colors, shapes, and perfumes; guppies, piranhas, and other strange fishes of tropical rivers; chameleons, diverse in shape and changeable in color; spotted cats; macaws splashed with garish hues; and amiable, furry lemurs and monkeys, so full of personality and designing intelligence.
Likewise, some insects, such as beetles or caterpillars, have mouths designed to chew leaves, while others, such as aphids, cicadas, and leafhoppers, have mouths designed as sharp-edged tubes that can pierce leaves or stems to suck sap: no one mouth can do both jobs well. Moreover, just as a business creates opportunities for other kinds of business to manufacture tools and provide services needed by the first, and (however inadvertently) opportunities for thieves to steal some of the goods or money thus accumulated, organisms provide livings for other organisms.
The vastly more stable climate and food supply of tropical habitats are what most enhance tropical-forest diversity. 2) and birds, as well as hummingbirds (fig. 22) and bats specialized to suck nectar from flowers. Similarly, the continual availability of leaves provides livings for leaf-eating sloths in the trees (fig. 23), browsing tapirs on the ground, hordes of herbivorous insects (larval and adult beetles [fig. 25], caterpillars of butterflies and moths, most of whose adults live on flower nectar, sap-sucking aphids, cicadas, leafhoppers, and so forth [fig.