Customer Reviews

An Introduction to Tropical Rain Forests

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a good general introduction to the tropical rainforest of the world. It includes sections on plants, ecology, convergent evolution, and human use. It has some black and white photographs and 'classic' diagrams and graphs. It's technical level is probably that of early university ecology. (It is obviously good, as someone has knocked my copy off!)
Damon Ramsey, author of "Rainforest of tropical Australia"

I have a copy of this book. I known the author, the late Dr. Timothy Whitmore for more than three years in the 1970s. He was then a Colombo Plan Botanist assigned to the Forest Research Institute, Kepong, Malaysia. I was then the Institute's photographer. Whitmore would often ask me to accompany him to explore the forests to take photographs of trees and plants. I am experienced in available light photography in the dim and dense forests and this expertise have come to good use with Whitmore which he appreciated. Whitmore's classic introduction to the tropical rain forest has been unique and comprehensively revised and updated, reflecting the changes which have taken place since it was first published in 1990. His grasp of the uniqueness of the tropical rain forest is thorough and knowledgeable. I spent three years with him, on and off, exploring this fascinating region of forest in the tropics which is in the danger of being destroyed by commercial timber exploitation, especially in Sarawak and Sabah. Whitmore and myself explored the northern forested region of Malaysia in 1968, known as the Kemahang Storm Forest, in which the matured trees had a strange bend some 30 feet above the ground. Then our party proceeded to the Sg. Geolok River which serves as the international boundary between Thailand and Malaysia. There, we were surprised to find elephants hauling logs. I photographed the entire process. Later, Whitmore and myself, wrote an article concerning these working elephants in hauling logs and it appeared in an issue of the official Malaysian Forester journal. I highly recommend this book to students of nature as well as forestry.

It was a book that helped me gain knowledge but it also made me want to go out and explore it, it was fabulous Icould hardly put it down and it helped a lot with my research paper. Thanks