A Land of Ghosts The Braided Lives of People and the Forest in Far Western Amazonia

About this book

For thirty years David Campbell has been conducting ecological studies in the Brazilian Amazon, where more species live than have ever existed anywhere else at any time in the four-billion-year history of life on our planet. In the eighteen hectares of rainforest Campbell has studied are 20,000 individual trees of about 2,000 species - three times as many species of trees as there are in all of North America. And each tree is an ecosystem in itself, bearing fungi, lichens, mosses, reptiles, mammals, birds, spiders, scorpions, beetles and uncountable legions of insects. Campbell knows each tree on his study sites as an individual.

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Biography

David G. Campbell is an ecologist and explorer who has carried out research on all seven continents, most notably in the Amazonian rainforests and in Antarctica. He is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Nations and the Global Environment at Grinnell College, Iowa. The Crystal Desert, Campbell's book about the Antarctic Peninsula, was published by Cape in 1993.