TROPICAL FORESTS AND TRACE GASES - POTENTIAL INTERACTIONS BETWEEN TROPICAL BIOLOGY AND THE ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES

Tropical forests are major contributors to the composition of the atmosphere, and anthropogenic changes to tropical ecosystems have driven changes in the atmosphere. Tropical biologists can make and have made significant contributions to understanding these effects, but we can also learn a great deal from the atmospheric sciences. In this paper, we show how knowledge about the functioning of tropical ecosystems can contribute to building a global source budget for a greenhouse gas (nitrous oxide), and how accumulating information from atmospheric measurements suggests that increased concentrations of a reactive gas (tropospheric ozone) represent a significant perturbation to tropical ecosystems-even in remote areas.