The rainforest edge : plant and soil ecology of Maracá Island, Brazil /

Marac'a Island lies between two branches of Brazil's Uraricoera River, which later flows into the Rio Branco, then the Rio Negro and, finally, the Amazon near Manaus. Located about 100 km from the northwestern border of Brazil with Venezuela, in the state of Roraima, the island comprises about 100,000 hectares; in the 1970s the Brazilian government designated it a protected research area and built an ecology laboratory on its eastern end. This book presents the fruits of the first series of research projects on the site, organized by Britain's Royal Geographical Society (Hemming is director and secretary of the society and also leader of the Marac'a project). The island's vegetation is mostly "terra firma" forest--slightly elevated from the watershed and thus not subjected to seasonal flooding--but there are also several hundred hectares of unflooded savanna, creating a "rainforest's edge." The book's nine papers cover forest structure, floristics, soil nutrient content and cycling, changes at the forest-savanna boundaries, remote sensing, responses to disturbance, and geomorphology. The papers are quite variable in length, style, and particularly quality of illustrations (one contains a LANDSAT thematic-mapper image reduced to black-and-white in a way that renders it useless). Each paper has its own bibliography, and there is a glossary and a list of participants. Graduate; faculty. W. E. Williams; St. Mary's College of Maryland