REVIEW SHEET FOR KLING LECTURES IN GLOBAL CHANGE

The Tropical Rain Forest

Take home message:

"Never believe anything that you can calculate for yourself"

Main Terms:

Nutrient cycling

Soil fertility

Biodiversity

Main Concepts:

·         How are the factors of temperature and rainfall in general related to the location of tropical forests around the globe?

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

·         What makes humid tropical forests so productive?

·         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.

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

·         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?