Tropical forest community ecology

Tropical forests have, in equal measure, fascinated and frustrated naturalists, explorers and scientists for centuries. Few other terrestrial ecosystems confront ecologists so plainly with their empirical and theoretical shortcomings. As Marlow, the narrator of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness muses ‘… all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, … He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him’. For botanists, ecologists and zoologists working in tropical forests, the remarkable diversity is intriguing and captivating, but simultaneously overwhelming. Thirty years ago the flow of new…