Resumos do 56o Congresso Nacional de Botânica. Tropical Rain Forests: Comparisons and Experiments

Few areas of the world are as misunderstood as the tropics. The term itself is misused when scientists talk about “the tropics” as if they were one place, forgetting that “tropics” is plural and refers to diverse ecosystems. There is a popular impression—reinforced by travel posters and mass media—that tropical rainforests in particular are everywhere an interchangeable mass of tall trees filled with birds, vines, monkeys, and insects. Scientists like Paul Richards (The Tropical Rainforest) and Tim Whitmore (An Introduction to Tropical Rainforests) inadvertently support this impression by describing unifying properties of rainforests worldwide. Emphasizing commonalities encourages readers to overlook the fact that each rainforest has unique plants, animals, climate, topography, and history. It has also unintentionally discouraged research that makes comparisons between regions, promoting instead a tendency to fill gaps in the scientific understanding of one rainforest region by reference to studies in other regions. Does the research done in Borneo really apply to the Amazon? Does research carried out in Brazil apply to the situation in Madagascar? Conservation is hampered by such assumptions; though rainforest regions all need protection, action must target specific threats and adapt to ecological characteristics present in each region. Policies, tactics, and techniques that work in one region may prove ineffective—or disastrous—in another. For example, the combination of logging, cattle and soybean industries found in Brazil has no exact counterpart in the war-torn Congo basin of Africa, so conservation measures developed in one region are unlikely to be effective in the other.