and nourish. If our goal as human beings is to sharethis planet with other species in an equitable way,responsibly managing forests for both timber and bio-diversity is essential. We must see both the forest andthe trees.

Sandra KnappDepartment of Botany

The Natural History MuseumCromwell Road

London SW7 5BD, UK

0006-3207/00/$ - see front matter # 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

PI I : S0006-3207(99 )00124-X

VaÂrzea: Diversity, Development, and Conservation ofAmazonia's Whitewater Floodplains; C. Padoch, J.M.Ayres, M. Pinedo-Vasquez, A. Henderson (Eds.); Advancesin Economic Botany, vol. 13; The New York BotanicalPress, New York, 1999, 407 pages, ISBN 0-89327-419-4,pbk, US$39.50

Floodplains are wetlands that periodically alternatebetween ¯ooded and non-¯ooded phases, thus present-ing a speci®c set of ecological challenges to aquatic andterrestrial organisms. Humans are no exception to thisrule, which is why these highly productive habitats havebeen severely modi®ed since the cradle of agriculture,and largely eliminated along river basins throughout theworld. Floodplains arguably ®nd their greatest expres-sion on Earth in Amazonian lowland (va rzea) forestsseasonally ¯ooded by whitewater rivers that can sustainprolonged inundations of up to 12 m for over half theyear. These are perhaps the most seasonal tropicalenvironments, which partly explains the lower levels oflocal species richness compared to adjacent non¯ooded(terra ®rme) forests. Va rzea forests also present a majorconservation challenge in that they have historicallysupported some of the highest densities of tropical for-est dwellers, while safeguarding a disproportionateshare of the Amazonian regional biodiversity. Forinstance, roughly one ®fth of the 4000±5000 Amazoniantree species are tolerant to periodic ¯ooding of severalweeks to many months, even though this forest typeaccounts for only 3% of the acreage in the entire region.In several other taxonomic groups, there appears to be asimilar level of species turnover across adjacent va rzeaand terra ®rme forests.This book is the ®nal product of a symposium held in

Macapa , Brazil (December 1994), the ®rst internationalconference devoted entirely to the topic of va rzea. Thebook gathers from 52 researchers and policy experts acollection of 25 papers on the ecology, geomorphology,resource extraction and conservation of Amazonian

va rzeas, including fresh results from several recent stu-dies derived from sustainable development projects. Thechapters are structured into ®ve thematic sections Ð on®sh and ®sheries, forests and forestry, conservation, soiland river dynamics, and land resource management Ðeach of which is preceded by a short introduction by aguest author, plus an odd section with a single paper onthe decline of stingless bees. The book captures an evengeographical spread, including studies at ¯oodplain sitesalong tributaries of upper Amazonia and the MiddleSolimoÄ es (=Amazon) river, to the tidal forests of theAmazon estuary in Amapa , although not all of these canbe de®ned as classic va rzeas. Although there are someinteresting chapters on the ecology of a ®sh communityin the lower Japura river and on va rzea palm diversity,there appears to be a conspicuous lack of biology andmainstream ecology here. Indeed, the vast majority ofchapters describe the impact and social signi®cance ofdi�erent extractive industries for either commercial orsubsistence gain. In that sense the book is primarily pre-occupied with the development versus conservationparadigm rather than with the diversity of va rzea forestsat varying ecological scales as the title may suggest [butsee a complementary collection of paper in Junk (1997)].This book is timely, however, because of the growing

awareness of the economic signi®cance of Amazonianwhitewater ¯oodplains, which in recent decades arebeing rapidly plundered by selective loggers or con-verted into ricefarms and water bu�alo ranches, fol-lowing the earlier cycles of jute and cacao production.These are ultimately the main threats to the ¯oodplaineconomy and resource conservation as the ®sheries,timber extraction, and the very alluvial soil sustainingthis ecosystem depends directly on the va rzea forests forat least part of the year. As pointed out by one of the``introducers'' (M. Goulding), too much attention isgiven in the book to managing local social con¯icts,such as disputes over ®shing rights in oxbow lakes,rather than ®nding ways to protect habitats. Because of

394 Book reviews / Biological Conservation 93 (2000) 393±395

their relatively large populations of caboclos and riber-enÄos, physical accessibility, and development pressure,Amazonian va rzeas remain one of the greatest con-servation challenges and imperatives in the lowlandtropics. In the vast majority of cases, va rzea reserveswill never be feasibly protected without the voluntaryparticipation of resident human populations, as docu-mented in several studies presented here. It is hoped thatpolicy makers will heed some of the lessons learned inthese papers, which will be crucial in the conservation ofAmazonia's most productive forest habitats.

References

Junk, W.J. (Ed.), 1997. The Central Amazon Floodplain: Ecology of

a Pulsing System. Springer, Berlin.

Carlos PeresSchool of Environmental Sciences

University of East AngliaNorwich NR4 7TJ, UK

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Book reviews / Biological Conservation 93 (2000) 393±395 395