Trees make a forest: they are both the constructors and the construction. To understand the forest, we must know about the trees. This book is about the trees of the tropical rain forest. It was written with the aim of summarizing contemporary understanding of the ecology of tropical rain-forest trees, with particular reference to comparative ecology.
The analysis of patterns of variation among species is a valuable technique for identifying possibly adaptive trends and evolutionary constraints. It may also provide a means of classifying species in ecological terms. A workable ecological classification might mean that the rain-forest community could be conceptually simplified and made more amenable to analysis.
The organization of the book follows the life cycle of a tree. The living, growing mature tree is introduced with reference to form and process. Reproduction, including pollination and seed dispersal, follows. Then come consideration of seed germination, seedling establishment and growth, and the completion of the life cycle. At each stage a range of different characteristics and phenomena relevant to tree species growing wild in the tropical rain forest are considered.
I have tried to give some idea of what is typical, and what is rare, the range and central tendency exhibited among species, and whether discrete groupings, or a continuous variation, are observed within the forest, and also whether one character tends to be correlated with another.
Finally, I have tried to bring all the observations together in a critical analysis of ecological classification systems for tree species in the tropical rain forest. I have deliberately avoided the ‘historical approach’ to reviewing the scientific literature. There are points in Favour of following the chronological development of ideas in a particular field, but in this case, I felt it was not absolutely necessary.
Firstly, there are several excellent texts that summaries much of the older work on tropical rain forests, notably P.W. Richards’ The tropical rain forest (Richards 1952, 1996) and T.C. Whitmore’s Tropical rain forests of the Far East (Whitmore 1975, 1984).
Secondly, I wanted to avoid the problems of interpreting history with the benefit of hindsight. Glimmerings of ideas that later became important can often be found by careful sifting through earlier writing, but at the time such works were published those ideas had little if any impact.
Thirdly, I believe many readers are more interested in the contemporary state of knowledge and understanding than how we arrived at that position. I estimate that there are some 50 000–60 000 tree species occurring in the tropical rain forests of the world. We have a detailed knowledge of the ecology of perhaps a few hundred of these at best.
This book is therefore
written from a perspective of abject ignorance, which I hope readers will bear
in mind when consulting these pages.
