Vegetation Dynamics and Global Change

In the greenhouse debate, one of the most critical questions is how the world's forests will respond to a changing climate. This book introduces ecologists, environmentalists, foresters and earth scientists to the models which describe the forests and their rate of change. A number of techniques are available for projecting large-scale vegetation patterns, based on models incorporating fundamental biological mechanisms. This volume surveys the sophisticated mathematical and computational tools used in making predictions. Special attention is paid to the importance of scale in global studies. The chapters range from physiological phenomena typically measured at small scale to stand dynamics of forests, large-scale models of forest dynamics, the reconstruction of forest vegetation as a means of understanding current global change, and the role of forests in the global carbon cycle