Update TRENDS in Ecology and Evolution Vol.20 No.6 June 2005286

their own merit and I appreciated them. Threecenturies on, Rumphius’ ‘unknown mountain rangesand wildernesses’ seem just a little better known. Thekey question now is how to ensure that some of thesegreat forests remain for another three centuries.

Corresponding author: Davy, A.J. (a.davy@uea.ac.uk).Available online 20 April 2005

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References

1 Beekman, E.M., ed. (1993) The Poison Tree: Selected Writings ofRumphius on the Natural History of the Indies, Oxford University Press

0169-5347/$ - see front matter Q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.tree.2005.04.017

Museum specimens breathe life into plantconservation?Plant Conservation: A Natural History Approach edited by Gary A. Krupnick and W. John Kress. University of Chicago Press, 2005.

US$75.00/US$30.00, £52.50/£21.00 hbk/pbk (344 pages) ISBN 0 226 45512 2/0 226 45513 0

Anthony J. Davy

Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Conservation, School of Biological Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, NR4 7TJ

The great museums, herbaria and bota-nic gardens of the world are assuming anew importance, probably unimaginedby their founders and largely unsus-pected even a generation ago. Molecularmethods have helped to reinvigorate thediscipline of taxonomy, and the need fortaxonomy as the basis for an inventoryof biodiversity is greater than ever. Yet

now, plant conservationists are also

looking to these vast repositories of data to answer amuch broader range of questions. We know the value ofindividual specimens; Daniel Janzen’s eloquent plea, inthe foreword to Plant Conservation, for the genetic‘barcoding’ of all plant species is ambitious testimony tothis. More broadly, these collections represent extensiverecords of distribution and abundance, referenced in bothspace and time. Developments in bioinformatics arebeginning to unlock the storehouse of archived infor-mation [1]. It is, for example, possible to investigatechanges in flowering time in response to climatic warmingover centuries [2] and calculate the probability of anintermittently recorded species now being extinct [3,4].The subtleties of documenting extinctions are describedelegantly by one contributor to Plant Conservation as‘chiaroscuro in shades of green’. The long tradition ofinstitutional natural history provides both the context anda distinctive rationale for this book on plant conservation.Both editors and no less than 25 out of the 48 contributorsare associated with the renowned Smithsonian Institution(http://www.mnh.si.edu). Other contributors representvarious other institutions in the USA, Brazil, Britain,Germany and Venezuela.

The scope of Plant Conservation encompasses mostaspects of plant conservation. The first part provides a‘primer’ on plant evolution and diversification over thepast 450 million years, current diversity (on land and inthe oceans), and extinction (past and present). These

concise background reviews will be valuable to a widerange of readers. The conservation theme is developedwith case studies that illustrate particular habitats andtaxonomic groups. Inevitably, the coverage of case studiesin a book of this size is limited but the choices are not asarbitrary as they might seem. Emphasis on the threatsand their consequences in the tropics–subtropics is, afterall, tracking areas with high biodiversity and endemism(although three of the five habitat case studies are fromthe Venezuelan–Equadorian Andes and Guiana Shieldarea of South America). The threats to a broad spectrum oftaxonomic groups and responses to such threats are alsoconsidered. Among these groups, dinoflagellates representthe biodiversity of the oceans; for land plants, there arefairly brief accounts of lichens, mosses and just sixrepresentative flowering-plant families. These choiceslargely reflect the specialist resources within the Smith-sonian but do show how little we know about some of thesegroups, especially (and predictably) the lower plants.There is an exploration of the contemporary causes ofplant extinction that includes many examples. The litanyof relevant topics is becoming depressingly familiar:habitat fragmentation and degradation, the problems ofinvasive species, the consequences of global climatechange and the genetic consequences of reduced popu-lation sizes. Again, these are rather condensed, example-based reviews. The examples of habitat loss are reason-ably diverse but the account of the effects of global climatechange is based on an article on the spring flora ofWashington DC, which seems a paradoxically parochialtreatment of a global issue. Dealing with conservationgenetics in ten pages is also somewhat of a challenge;readers are introduced to basic concepts and a fewcommon molecular methods.

The section about the practicalities of plant conserva-tion brings the value of biological collections and naturalhistory into focus, notwithstanding acknowledged limi-tations and biases in the record. Without such infor-mation, we could not map diversity, identify hotspots,ecoregions and centres of diversity, or establish priority

Update TRENDS in Ecology and Evolution Vol.20 No.6 June 2005 287

areas. Neither could we sensibly assess conservationstatus, whether by red-data book protocols or screeningfor genetic variability. Management strategies and estab-lishment of appropriate legal frameworks similarlydepend on this accumulated wisdom. In many ways, thespecies-oriented theme of Plant Conservation comp-lements the endeavours of ecological restoration instriving to repair the ever-escalating damage to ecosys-tems that threatens so many species [5,6]. Broad coverageof a large and complex subject has been achieved by whatthe editors call ‘diverse sampling of conservation activi-ties’ and by bringing together the expertises of manyspecialists. There are some jewels among these contri-butions, but the ‘natural history’ approach overall is alsosuccessful. Any student of plant conservation wouldbenefit from this accessible insight into the problemsthat plant life faces. Perhaps there is consolation to bederived after all from hundreds of millions of dead plants,accumulated in museums and herbaria over centuries,

Corresponding author: Skorping, A. (arne.skorping@zoo.uib.no).Available online 19 April 2005

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becoming instrumental in the future conservation of plantdiversity.

References

1 Graham, C.H. et al. (2004) New developments in museum-basedinformatics and applications in biodiversity analysis. Trends Ecol.Evol. 19, 497–503

2 Primack, D. et al. (2004) Herbarium specimens demonstrate earlierflowering times in response to warming in Boston. Am. J. Bot. 91,1260–1264

3 Solow, A.R. and Roberts, D.L. (2003) A nonparametric test forextinction based on a sighting record. Ecology 84, 1329–1332

4 Roberts, D.L. and Solow, A.R. (2003) When did the Dodo becomeextinct? Nature 426, 245–245

5 Perrow M.R. and Davy, A.J., eds (2002) Handbook of EcologicalRestoration (Vol. 1 Principles of Restoration), Cambridge UniversityPress

6 Perrow M.R. and Davy, A.J., eds (2002) Handbook of EcologicalRestoration (Vol. 2 Restoration in Practice), Cambridge UniversityPress

0169-5347/$ - see front matter Q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.tree.2005.04.015

Parasites in the grand scheme of thingsParasites and Ecosystems edited by Frederic Thomas, Francois Renaud and Jean-Francois Guegan. Oxford University Press, 2005.

£65.00 hbk (232 pages) ISBN 0 19 852986 4

Arne Skorping

Department of Biology, University of Bergen, Allegaten 41, N-5007 Bergen, Norway

Wherever there is life, there areprobably parasites. You will have tosearch hard and long to find a popu-lation, food chain, community or eco-system that is not affected byparasitism. Parasites can change hostbehaviour, affect life histories, deter-mine who eats whom in a food chain,

produce trophic cascades or cause

mass extinctions. Some of the most dramatic ecologicalperturbations that we know of in recent times have beencaused by parasites, such as the Rinderpest virus inAfrican ungulates. However, few ecosystem ecologists areinterested in organisms with this life style. According tothe first chapter of Parasites and Ecosystems, the journalEcosystems has yet to publish a paper with the words‘parasite’ or ‘parasitism’ in the title or abstract since itbegan in 1998.

This paradox is raised several times in the currenttext and the author suggests some reasons: Parasitesare elusive, disgusting and have subtle effects, but thiscannot be the whole answer. Many free-living organismsare small and disgusting, yet still eagerly studied.Moreover, most scientists tend to be fascinated by effectsthat are not obvious. Perhaps an additional reason is

that parasites are hard to study. Ecologists use binocu-lars, live traps, sieves and nets, but they dislike killing alot of animals, which is what you need to do to observethat an apparent healthy population of deer harboursthousands of parasitic nematodes. Another reason isthe unfortunate division between classic parasitologyand ecology. The study of parasites requires such anexpertise that most parasitologists have been contentwith finding, naming and counting worms. Add theintricate elucidation of how parasites are transmittedbetween hosts and you have an intellectually challeng-ing discipline that can live on isolated from mainstreamecology.

This situation has changed over the past few decades:ecologists are taking increasing interest in parasites,and parasitologists are addressing real ecological ques-tions. Parasites and Ecosystems is a good example and, ifits aim is to make biologists aware of the potentialimportance of parasites for understanding ecosystemdynamics, it succeeds. The message that parasites areubiquitous and have far-reaching ecological effects ishammered home in most chapters, and, when reachingthe end of the book, I was left with the impression thatecological parasitologists suffer from a lack of confi-dence: they overstate their case. Here, I think theeditors could have done a better job by adding a chapterabout parasite species richness, and removing some of