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Contents:

Introduction; Tropical rainforests; Tropical woodlands, savannas and grasslands; Wetlands; Deserts; Temperate forests; High latitude wilderness areas.

Review:

This book is a massive undertaking in more ways than one! At 573 pages and 5.5kg it stands out for sheer size. Beyond that, the quality of presentation is superb: amongst the very best this reviewer has ever seen. This is one time when 'lavish production' actually means something. The photographs are stunning in their colour and composition. This alone makes it an ideal target for students who would be spellbound at these views of global ecosystems.

Usually, most books stop at this but this text is also a detailed scientific report. The US group 'Conservation International' (CI) set about researching the world's key wilderness areas. When part of its work was released it made headlines in both mainstream and scientific press. There was the suggestion that almost half of the world could be considered wilderness (far higher than most estimates) but that very little of this was actually being conserved in some way. Areas identified by CI had already passed strict criteria in terms of size, vegetation and human population. From these criteria, 37 places were named and grouped into the categories noted above. To assist the reader, the work starts with an introduction describing the work of CI in preparing the report. Although a feature of the conservation areas is biodiversity, the project starts with a detailed examination of the concept of wilderness. To those of us living in Europe this might seem unusual (certainly our lack of untouched areas limits our examples here to two) but there is much to commend this approach. It informed the US perspective in the 19th Century and was certainly part of the thinking behind the UK National Parks in the 1940s. It also makes the reader think about the meaning of nature and the value we put on it. To reinforce these ideas, the authors continue by providing brief area and biodiversity data for their sites. Finally, we get to see their criteria for wilderness and a concluding section with an overview of key conservation organisations.

The remainder of the book is given over to descriptions of the sites mentioned previously. As one would expect there is a common format as illustrated by the first example, Amazonia. Global and regional maps locate the resource. Here one is reminded that Amazonia is more than just the Amazon as they take the wilderness region into the Andes and the 5 nations controlling these areas. Since boundaries are crucial to conservation areas it is refreshing to see the opening parts of this subchapter discuss the range of definitions and ideas that have been applied to this region. This first part concludes with a brief discussion of the various ecoregions into which Amazonia can be divided. For those new to ecoregions this might be confusing but the idea (started in the US in the mid 1990s) to delineate larger-scale ecosystems with consistent floral/faunal composition and physical conditions has much to recommend it. These huge global sites cannot be considered as one ecosystem (and biome is too coarse a scale) and the standard ecosystem would be far too small. This compromise works well at the regional level (and would be useful to beginners trying to appreciate variation without being bogged down in detail). The second part of the Amazonia work looks at biodiversity not just in terms of numbers but illustrations of the range of species found. Since most will recognise rainforests for a small number of key organisms it comes as no surprise to see part three of the subchapterlooking at flagship species. Whilst we might be thinking that keystone or even umbrella species would be better examples to use, this does allow the authors to cast a wider net to focus on species that would interest the lay reader as well as have some scientific value. The next subheading looks at human culture. By definition this is going to be small but significant as most of the people are part of the indigenous cultures that are at the focus of recent concerns about conservation and exploitation of these regions. Finally, we have a section headed 'threats' but which also describes some of the projects aimed at reducing these threats. It's better to see this as an overview of our responses to inappropriate human development on the region. Although the remaining 36 areas occupy different amounts of space in the text, these headings and the quality of work behind them, continues.

In short, this is an amazing book. It provides a credible scientific analysis set in a format accessible to the lay person but also with enough of interest to enthuse the student. This must be seen as one of the most significant texts this year and one which deserves to be on every library shelf.