About this site
Providing tropical forest news, statistics, photos, and information, rainforests.mongabay.com is the world's most popular rainforest site. [more]
A Place Out of Time is written for those who have an interest in the natural world. It is scripted to appeal to a broad audience so that readers from grade school students to stockbrokers to plumbers can enjoy and learn about tropical rainforests. Rhett has sought to broaden the reach and horizons of this text by incorporating and bringing together far flung—and sometimes seemingly unrelated—information from a variety of sources not easily accessible to most readers. In the process the author has tried to simplify the sometimes complex subject matter and provide some insight into the current economic, political, and social climate for tropical rainforests.
Special thanks to William Bridges for web copyediting this work. Bill, a veteran editor and former director of the Pulliam School of Journalism at Franklin College, is based in Indiana.
Also thanks to Nancy, Penn and Anne for their support.
"Rainforest" is used interchangeably with "rain forest" on this site. Same for "rainforests" and "rain forests". "Jungle" is generally not used.
Recent news
Amazon deforestation rate falls to lowest on record (8/10/2007) Deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon for the previous year were the lowest on record, according to preliminary figures released by INPE, Brazil's National Institute of Space Research.
Lowland rainforest less diverse than previously thought (8/9/2007) While rainforests are the world's libraries of biodiversity, species richness may be more evenly distributed in some forests than in others, reports an extensive new study by an international team of entomologists and botanists. The work, published in the current issue of the journal Nature, has important implications for forest management and conservation strategies.
Experts: parks effectively protect rainforest in Peru (8/9/2007) High-resolution satellite monitoring of the Amazon rainforest in Peru shows that land-use and conservation policies have had a measurable impact on deforestation rates. The research is published in the August 9, 2007, on-line edition of Science Express.
