Customer Reviews

Forest Canopies, Second Edition (Physiological Ecology)

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I do not know if I am right, but I get the impression that there is a core group of canopy scientist (Dial, Lowman, Nadkarni, Rinker, Sillett, Van Pelt, etc.) whose articles are interesting and of high quality, but there are also others invited to write, who have not exactly known, what they should write. For example, chapter 19 "Nutrient Cycling" artificially restricts the discussion on canopies. I think trees are entities and their nutrient uptake cannot be ignored. The authors of chapter 21 "Decomposition in Forest Canopies" seem to have had difficulties to find, what to write for their short article. Some chapters require certain background knowledge, e.g. 17 "Photosynthesis in Forest Canopies".

As forest canopies are hard to reach, it would be nice to see beautiful photos of different canopies. Unfortunately, there are not much photos, they are small, many of them black and white and often unsharp.

Many chapters include extensive praise to the new canopy access techniques. Forest canopies are "final frontiers", like nobody would have seen them before. New rope based techniques have certainly vastly improved data gathering from canopies, but they have been entered from pre-historic times for gathering fruits, honey etc. Actually, not more than a ladder is needed to access canopy, and many ordinary people are also able to climb trees without any aid. Of course, not the canopies of the giant trees of western North America, and the trees of tropical rainforest may also pose great difficulties. This brings me to the fact that the discussion is concentrated in very tall forests and tropical rainforests so much that one could think other forests do not have canopies. Some writers almost equate canopy = tropical rainforest canopy.

Despite my cricism, I find this book very interesting, but I would like less praise, and instead one chapter on the canopies of temperate deciduous forest.

This review of the tropical forest canopy is thorough and provocative. The contributing authors bring a wide experience to the topic.