Living in a Dynamic Tropical Forest Landscape is an impressive tome (over 600 pages) on the tropical rainforests of north-eastern Australia and synthesizes recent research from the Cooperative Research Centre for Tropical Ecology and Management which ran from 1993 to 2006. The book is sensibly organized and nicely formatted and there is a small section of colour plates in the centre. The chapters are arranged into six sections (History and biodiversity of the wet tropics, Ecological processes and other ecosystem services, Threats to the environmental values of the wet tropics, Living in a World Heritage Area, Restoring tropical forest landscapes, and Science informing policy and conservation and management of tropical forests) with each of these being completed with a short synthesis by leading academics to summarize and put the preceding chapter into a global context. These summaries are useful in illuminating the main points and preventing the book from becoming overly Austral-centric.

The 49 chapters, from around 80 authors, cover a lot of ground and, although I only read a sample of the chapters, I learnt a lot about this region of forest, which is actually smaller than many individual national parks in other parts of the world. The main strength of the book is that it does not simply eulogize the biological diversity of this region (although this is done to a certain degree), but brings human interactions with the forest landscape to the fore. In this vein, there are particularly valuable chapters on forest restoration, where Australian ecologists are probably the world leaders, and anthropogenic threats to the forest. Other particularly interesting chapters are on the history of the listing of the World Heritage Area and on Aboriginal engagement with, and management planning of, the forest. Whilst the biological coverage of the book is undoubtedly extensive, including plant, vertebrate and invertebrate diversity, I felt that there could have been more on below-ground ecology, perhaps on soil variation or soil organisms. There was also very little on conservation genetics, where Australia has a strong record among the tropically forested countries.

Overall, however, I found this to be a very informative book on the wet tropics of Australia. The editors are quite correct in noting that ‘there are no texts that provide such a holistic view of any tropical forest landscape including the social, cultural and economic dimensions’ and they should be congratulated on producing a book which fills this gap. However, I remain somewhat unclear on the expected audience of this book; many northern hemisphere university courses are likely to focus on the more famous forests of Amazonia and South-east Asia, and this is also where a large proportion of the research is carried out. I therefore suspect that this book will not be in circulation as much as other general texts on tropical forests. If I am correct, this will be owing to its limited geographical scope rather than any shortcomings of the content.