REVIEW SHEET FOR KLING LECTURES IN GLOBAL CHANGE

The Tropical Rain Forest

Take home message:

"Sometimes knowing the science just isn’t enough…”"

Main Terms:

Nutrient cycling

Soil fertility

Biodiversity

Transpiration, evaporation, and precipitation (water cycle)

Main Concepts:

·         What makes humid tropical forests so productive?

·         How can the most productive forests in the world occur on soils of extremely low fertility?

·         Why are tropical soils nutrient-poor?  What evidence do we have that the forest soils have low fertility?  Describe the relationships among the biosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere with respect to nutrient location and cycling in the tropics.

·         What happens to the forest’s nutrients when the forest is harvested for timber or the forest is burned for agriculture or ranch land? 

·         If the humid tropical forests are destroyed, what consequences might will there be?

·         Why is biological diversity concentrated in the tropics?

·         What are the ideas about how such great speciation in the tropical forests came about?

·         How does global climate change drive forest fragmentation and speciation?

·       How do scientific principles and understanding fit into the sustainability of tropical forests and biodiversity?