The response of forests to global climate change is one of the most hotly contested issues in the greenhouse effect debate. This volume introduces ecologists, environmental scientists, foresters and earth scientists to the models which describe the function of forests and their rate of change.

Special attention is paid to the importance of scale in global studies. The chapters range from physiological phenomena typically measured at small scale to stand dynamics of forests, large-scale models of forest dynamics, the reconstruction of forest vegetation as a means of understanding current global change, and the role of forests in the global carbon cycle.