Introduction

Abstract

This issue is based on the proceedings of a symposium on ‘Tropical Forests and Global Atmospheric Change’ that was held at the Association for Tropical Biology annual meeting in Panama City, Panama, in July 2002. Our overall goal was to explore how the world's most biodiverse ecosystems might fare in an era of rapid atmospheric change. To achieve this we needed to ask original thinkers from a wide range of disciplines to focus on this common concern, often using new field data or new syntheses of existing data. Several researchers who could not attend the meeting were also invited to contribute to this Theme Issue which builds on advances in several distinct scientific disciplines.