Biotic Impoverishment and Climate Change: Global Causes of Forest Decline?

Abstract

During the last decade, forest decline in the Pacific region has received similar attention in the scientific literature (Old et al. 1981; Mueller-Dombois and McQueen 1983; Heatwole and Lowman 1986; White 1986; Ash 1988; Lawesson 1988) as the forest decline in Europe and eastern North America (Smith 1981; McLaughlin 1985; Ulrich 1986; Manion 1988; Ziegler 1988; Schulze et al. 1989; Tomlinson 1990; Zoettl and Huettl 1991). However, because of the emphasis on industrial pollution, the Atlantic forest decline has been much more widely publicized by the media (Hinrichson 1987; Raloff 1989). The fact that widespread forest decline and dieback have been observed in both the Pacific and Atlantic regions points to underlying global causes that may relegate air pollution into a position of contributory causes (Arndt and Mueller-Dombois 1988; Mueller-Dombois 1988a, b). The researched forest decline and dieback areas in the Pacific region are situated in the clean-air environments of New Zealand (Wardle and Allen 1983; Stewart and Veblen 1983; Ogden 1988), Australia (Palzer 1983; Davison 1988; Landsberg and Wylie 1988), Papua New Guinea (Pajmans 1976; Arentz 1983; Ash 1988), Hawaii (Kliejunas and Ko 1974; Petteys et al. 1975; Mueller-Dombois 1987), the Galapagos Islands (Itow and Mueller-Dombois 1988; Lawesson 1988), and the Pacific Northwest (Walker and Auclair 1989).