Review of tropical dry forest biogeography, palaeontology, ecology and ecosystem functions.

This book investigates the fundamental role that tropical bioproductivity - or more specifically net primary productivity - has played in shaping the global geographies of food, finance, governance and people. The book examines the basic astronomical and thermal properties of our planet to illustrate the dynamic nature of the tropics and how the region resides at the very heart of global energetics, driving the environmental flows that shape planetary climate and bioproductivity. The author explores how the region’s relatively small, but hyper-productive, land area provided the groundswell for the economic, social, political and demographic changes that fuelled empires, European colonialism and nation-building. Also covered are discussions on how the critical intake of capital needed to fuel the industrial and technological revolutions driving modern globalization was first expropriated from the tropics by harnessing the region’s natural productivity and biological crop diversity and then transforming it into tradeable commodities using the inhabitants' labour and knowledge. With modern tropical nations accounting for the bulk of people living in poverty and registering some of the highest income disparities, the author presents cross-cutting evidence showing that their histories and the persistence of expropriating institutions have fostered anocratic tendencies, poor governance, unorthodox financial flows and mass migration. Tropical Bioproductivity cuts across vast geographies, topics and histories to deliver a readable narrative that links people, places and events with the environmental mechanics of our planet. It will be of interest to students and researchers in the areas of environmental studies, economics, history, agriculture, anthropology and geography.

Sustainable crop production is vital to ensure that supplies of fresh vegetables and their products are readily available. However, food security still remains a huge problem in areas of the world, including the tropics and sub-tropics, where communities rely solely on subsistence farming to meet their day to day food demands. It is evident that food production needs to become more sustainable to ensure economic stability and poverty reduction. With this in mind, "Tropical Vegetable Production" addresses the problems surrounding vegetable production in developing countries. Divided i.

This book presents a unique and comprehensive view of the fundamental dynamical and thermodynamic principles underlying the large circulations of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system Dynamics of The Tropical Atmosphere and Oceans provides a detailed description of macroscale tropical circulation systems such as the monsoon, the Hadley and Walker Circulations, El Niño, and the tropical ocean warm pool. These macroscale circulations interact with a myriad of higher frequency systems, ranging from convective cloud systems to migrating equatorial waves that attend the low-frequency background flow. Towards understanding and predicting these circulation systems. A comprehensive overview of the dynamics and thermodynamics of large-scale tropical atmosphere and oceans is presented using both a “reductionist” and “holistic” perspectives of the coupled tropical system. The reductionist perspective provides a detailed description of the individual elements of the ocean and atmospheric circulations. The physical nature of each component of the tropical circulation such as the Hadley and Walker circulations, the monsoon, the incursion of extratropical phenomena into the tropics, precipitation distributions, equatorial waves and disturbances described in detail. The holistic perspective provides a physical description of how the collection of the individual components produces the observed tropical weather and climate. How the collective tropical processes determine the tropical circulation and their role in global weather and climate is provided in a series of overlapping theoretical and modelling constructs. The structure of the book follows a graduated framework. Following a detailed description of tropical phenomenology, the reader is introduced to dynamical and thermodynamical constraints that guide the planetary climate and establish a critical role for the tropics. Equatorial wave theory is developed for simple and complex background flows, including the critical role played by moist processes. The manner in which the tropics and the extratropics interact is then described, followed by a discussion of the physics behind the subtropical and near-equatorial precipitation including arid regions. The El Niño phenomena and the monsoon circulations are discussed, including their covariance and predictability. Finally, the changing structure of the tropics is discussed in terms of the extent of the tropical ocean warm pool and its relationship to the intensity of global convection and climate change. Dynamics of the Tropical Atmosphere and Oceans is aimed at advanced undergraduate and early career graduate students. It also serves as an excellent general reference book for scientists interested in tropical circulations and their relationship with the broader climate system.

In this book I have tried to bring together the major developments in the study of insect populations in tropical environments. In some ways, this task has been a difficult one because conceptually it is virtually impossible to limit a discussion of insect ecology to the tropics, since the same concepts, theories, and hypoth eses concerning the mechanisms by which habitats support insect populations often apply both to temperate and to tropical regions. Thus one might argue effectively that a book such as Peter Price's Insect Ecology represents a more comprehensive treatment of insect ecology, including the tropical aspects. Yet because there has been a tremendous amount of new study on insects in the tropics in recent years, and because there has also been a strong historical interest in tropical insects, judging from early museum expeditions and medically and agriculturally oriented studies of insects in the New and Old World tropics, I believe there is a place for a book dealing almost exclusively with tropical insects. But logically so, such a book by necessity incorporates data and informa tion from Temperate Zone studies, if for no other reason than because insights into the properties of tropical environments often emerge from compariso'ns of species, communities, or faunas between temperate and tropical regions. An understanding of insect populations in the tropics cannot be divorced from a consideration of Temperate Zone populations.

The countries and their forests. The trees and their woods.