Nowhere eise in the world did industrialized countries leave such early marks in the rainforest as in West Africa. Past and present developments here are in one way or the other significant for rainforests on other continents as weil. West Africa is a pioneer in both a good and a bad sense. This is reason enough to take a closer Iook at the history of moist tropical West Africa. Until recently, no one really seemed to be interested in the rainforests except for a few specialists. The world's scientific community neglected to study the incalculable riches of tropical forests, to make the public aware of them and their due importance. Although interdisciplinary research has been a popular topic for some decades now, it was not applied to just the most complex habitat on earth. Scientists from all fields studied only that which was easiest to record, seemingly blind to a myriad of details awaiting closer examination. Botanists wentabout establishing their herbariums and paid much too little attention to the vegetation as a whole, or to the significance of useful plants for local populations. Zoologists, too, busied themselves with collecting and describing species. Anthropologists, on the other hand, tended to overlook faunal details: in their ignorance of the animal world, they wrote of tigers and deer in Africa. And finally, foresters saw neither the forest nor the trees for the timber - and even confused rainforests with monocultures of fir trees.

The rain forests of West Africa have been designated as one of the world's hotspots of biodiversity. They extend from Ghana to Senegal and are referred to as the Upper Guinean forests. Because of their isolated position, they harbour a large number of rare and endemic animal and plant species.This book focuses on the biodiversity and ecology of these forests. It analyses the factors that give rise to biodiversity and structure tropical plant communities. It also includes an atlas with ecological profiles of rare plant species and large timber species.

The United Nations has declared 2018-2028 as the International Decade for Action on Water for Sustainable Development. This is a timely designation. In an increasingly thirsty world, the subject of forest-water interactions is of critical importance to the achievement of sustainability goals. The central underlying tenet of this book is that the hydrologic community can conduct better science and make a more meaningful impact to the world’s water crisis if scientists are: (1) better equipped to utilize new methods and harness big data from either or both high-frequency sensors and long-term research watersheds; and (2) aware of new developments in our process-based understanding of the hydrological cycle in both natural and urban settings. Accordingly, this forward-looking book delves into forest-water interactions from multiple methodological, statistical, and process-based perspectives (with some chapters featuring data sets and open-source R code), concluding with a chapter on future forest hydrology under global change. Thus, this book describes the opportunities of convergence in high-frequency sensing, big data, and open source software to catalyze more comprehensive understanding of forest-water interactions. The book will be of interest to researchers, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates in an array of disciplines, including hydrology, forestry, ecology, botany, and environmental engineering.

"This book offers a timely, clear-headed, and uniquely important contribution to conservation, one that should be read by all bureaucrats, scientists, and others involved with development projects that supposedly benefit wildlife and wilderness."--George B. Schaller, author of Wildlife of the Tibetan Steppe

The dry forests and woodlands of Sub-Saharan Africa are major ecosystems, with a broad range of strong economic and cultural incentives for keeping them intact. However, few people are aware of their importance, compared to tropical rainforests, despite them being home to more than half of the continent's population. This unique book brings together scientific knowledge on this topic from East, West, and Southern Africa and describes the relationships between forests, woodlands, people and their livelihoods. Dry forest is defined as vegetation dominated by woody plants, primarily trees, the canopy of which covers more than 10 per cent of the ground surface, occurring in climates with a dry season of three months or more. This broad definition - wider than those used by many authors - incorporates vegetation types commonly termed woodland, shrubland, thicket, savanna, wooded grassland, as well as dry forest in its strict sense. The book provides a comparative analysis of management experiences from the different geographic regions, emphasizing the need to balance the utilization of dry forests and woodland products between current and future human needs. Further, the book explores the techniques and strategies that can be deployed to improve the management of African dry forests and woodlands for the benefit of all, but more importantly, the communities that live off these vegetation formations. Thus, the book lays a foundation for improving the management of dry forests and woodlands for the wide range of products and services they provide.

The report offers a simple framework for policy analysis by identifying three forest types: frontiers and disputed lands; lands beyond the agricultural frontier; and, mosaic lands where forests and agriculture coexist. It collates geographic and economic information for each type that will help formulate poverty-reducing forest policy.

This book has been developed from a workshop on Technological change in agriculture and tropical deforestation organised by the Center for International Forestry Research and held in Costa Rica in March, 1999. It explores how intensification of agriculture affects tropical deforestation using case studies from different geographical regions, using different agricultural products and technologies and in differing demographic situations and market conditions. Guidance is also given on future agricultural research and extension efforts.