Dr. Kricher’s full-color textbook is a great introductory textbook for tropical ecology courses. With increased interest globally in forest carbon and the underlying tropical forest ecological fundamentals that forest carbon offsets are manufactured from allowing climate change mitigation, this book provides a one-stop tropical forest ecology resource for those who work in the forest carbon field in the tropics. Key topics addressed, through a pan-tropical lens, include evolution, tropical rain forest structure and biodiversity, carbon flux and climate change, forest fragmentation, nutrient cycling, species richness, and flora and fauna relationships.
Dr. Kricher’s Tropical Ecology textbook with its thorough step-by-step analysis of tropical forest ecology processes begs us, those of us who work in the manufacturing and production of tropical forest carbon offsets, to consider if there are cost-effective mechanisms available that can more fully integrate tropical forest species richness into the quality of forest carbon offsets and the resulting pricing of forest carbon offsets currently under production globally. By considering this, within the context as framed by Dr. Kricher’s Tropical Ecology, we can begin to ask and consider questions such as a how do we integrate ecological species richness and species biodiversity into mtCO2e pricing mechanisms in a manner that allows different forest carbon offset product types to be manufactured and sold based on different sets of underlying species richness. In other words, should tropical forest refugia receive higher pricing for forest carbon offsets protecting these refugia because these refugia have higher tropical forest species richness than other non-refugia landscapes? We can also further expand upon this by suggesting that we could also address species endemism within forest carbon valuation as a method to increase carbon offsets pricing over carbon offsets sold from landscapes with lower endemism.
As we work globally to protect our threatened tropical forests whose ecology is described in Tropical Ecology, our challenge is to determine how to integrate these forests’ ecology as a fundamental building block to both financial risk and return mechanisms so that we can manufacture and produce carbon offsets that create value for all stakeholders while mitigating climate change.
Dr. Kricher’s Tropical Ecology textbook is a wonderful book and I look forward to re-reading his book many times over.
How to order:
Tropical Ecology
Cloth: 640 Pages, $85.00
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Author: John Kricher, PhD
Gabriel Thoumi frequently contributes to Mongabay.com.