This large-format edited volume, with foreword by Tom Lovejoy, includes contributions from 79 co-authors, a who´s who of tropical entomology. The book treats distribution, resource use and what little is known of the life histories of tropical canopy insects and spiders.
Enormous advances in the field have been made since the first book on canopy arthropods was published six years ago. Direct insect observation and collection techniques (canopy access systems) now complement indirect techniques such as chemical canopy fogging with insecticides. The new book is bigger, but treats a narrower field, focusing exclusively on canopy organisms from tropical habitats.
Acutely conscious of the still gaping holes in our knowledge of the worlds largest group of macro-organisms, the authors propose some of the first generalizations about canopy arthropods, which beg to be tested in diverse tropical ecosystems.
Arthropods from extreme tropical canopy environments differ from understory dwellers, whereas in temperate forests the vertical distribution of insects is far more uniform where such specialized microclimates and their extraordinarily specific fauna do not exist. In Guyana, one team found that when canopy habitat is destroyed, canopy insects can't live in the understory; they are eliminated with their host trees.
The book sets the bases for understanding the function and behavior of canopy arthropods and underscores the need to determine the vertical distribution of all stages of canopy insects´ life cycles. The adult stage of an insect herbivore in the canopy may develop from larvae living in leaf litter on the forest floor.
Whereas authors present data from Australia, Asia and Africa, the bulk of the work is from the New World. A significant fraction of this research was conducted under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution: at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama or by staff of the National Museum of Natural History and their collaborators. In particular, most of canopy research was performed in Panama under the umbrella of STRI's Forest Canopy Biology Program.
This program, which embraces a wide range of canopy research topics including plant ecology and physiology, animal ecology and nutrient and gas fluxes, began at STRI in 1990. Two construction cranes yield excellent access to canopy and understory layers at a dry forest site on the Pacific slope and at a rainforest site near the Atlantic entrance of the Panama Canal. This program has inspired a worldwide network of eleven forest canopy cranes managed by a variety of institutions.
Construction cranes facilitate analysis of the vertical distribution of forest organisms and replication of experiments in diverse tropical and temperate environments. For example, direct observations of insect feeding allow accurate estimates of insect-host plant specificity, essential information for estimating the total number of species on the earth.
In addition to cranes, scientists use rope walkways strung between trees, treetop bubbles floating on a guide wire, large platforms and sledges that rest or glide on top of the canopy, equipment borrowed from cavers to ascend vertical shafts, as well as fogging with toxic insecticide. Integration of all these methods of canopy access around a crane site will allow researchers to greatly enhance studies in canopy biology and, in particular, give them the ability to perform the future research suggested in this volume.
Arthropods of Tropical Forests, Spatio-Temporal Dynamics and Resource Use in the Canopy. Basset, Y., Novotny, V., Miller, S.E. and Kitching, R.L. (eds)
Publication date: January 23, 2003; ISBN: 0521820006, $110.00
http://titles.cambridge.org/catalogue.asp?ISBN=0521820006
The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, with headquarters in Panama City, Panama, is one of the world´s leading centers for basic research on the ecology, behavior and evolution of tropical organisms. http://www.stri.org