Written by the leading authorities on the plant diversity and ecology of the Pacific islands, this book is a magisterial synthesis of the vegetation and landscapes of the islands of the Pacific Ocean. It is organized by island group, and includes information on geography, geology, phytogeographic relationships, and human influences on vegetation. Vegetation of the Tropical Pacific Islands features over 400 color photographs, plus dozens of maps and climate diagrams. The authorsa (TM) efforts in assembling the existing information into an integrated, comprehensive book will be welcomed by biogeographers, plant ecologists, conservation biologists, and all scientists with an interest in island biology.

Forest damage, forest decline, forest dieback - not related to biotic agents - is occurring in the Atlantic and Pacific regions. In Europe and Eastern North America this serious problem is considered to be, at least to some part, related to industrial air pollutants and their atmospheric conversion products, such as acid rain or ozone. Forest declines in the Pacific region have been attributed largely to natural causes involving forest dynamics, since air pollution and other negative anthropogenic influences are practically absent. Presented here are typical decline phenomena in the Pacific and Atlantic region, potential causes, effects and mitigation strategies, and the question whether there are any similarities on a functional or structural basis is addressed.

This book is one of a series of volumes reporting results of research by U.S. scientists participating in the International Biological Program (IBP). As one of fifty-eight nations taking part in the IPB during the period July 1967 to June 1974, the United States organized a number of large, multidisciplinary studies pertinent to the central IBP theme of "the biological basis of productivity and human welfare." This volume is a synthesis of the methods and results of a team of thirty-five investigators to study the biological organization in the selected natural ecosystems of the Hawaiian Islands. The research was done between 1971 and 1976 as part of the U.S. contribution to the International Biological Program (IPB).

This book was written 30 years ago as the first synthesis of European and Anglo-American methods in vegetation ecology. Upon its publication in 1974, it rapidly became the standard text for the study of vegetation in over 60 US colleges and universities. An unsolicited review appeared in Ecology 56: 1233 (1975) with the title "Getting It All Together in Plant Synecology." The book also received wide international acceptance. "In his foreword to the 1974 edition, Raymond Fosberg referred to this book as 'by far the best work of its scope that I know.' It is still agreed that there is no comparable work. It was used as the only textbook for the first twenty offerings of one graduate course. For the past dozen years it's been moved to the recommended list because it has been out of print. There have been several vegetation science textbooks published since 1974, but their foci have been on ordination and multivariate data analysis instead of on sampling methods. No other text has covered the subject of vegetation sampling design in such depth, breadth, and impartiality as this book, Aims and Methods of Vegetation Ecology. Most of this material remains as current and topical today as it was a quarter of a century ago, because the progress that has been made in vegetation science is in the computer-based treatment of sample data, not in the creation of new sampling protocols.A new generation of vegetation ecologists can now have the same advantage - the same easy access to this classic reference work - that a past generation had in quantifying and summarizing the formidable complexity of natural, wildland vegetation." Foreword by Michael G. Barbour, Plant Ecologist, University of California at Davis, Department of Environmental Horticulture, November 2002.