Rain Forest Biology and the Canopy System, Sarawak, 1992¿2002 The rain forest takes an immense breath and then exhales, once every four or ?ve years, as a major global weather pattern plays out, usually heralded by El Nin ¿öSouthern Oscillation. While this powerful natural cycle has occurred for many millennia, it is during the past decade that both the climate of Earth and the people living on it have had an increasing in?uence on the weather pattern itself, with many biological consequences. In Southeast Asia, as also in most of the Neotropics, El Nin ¿o accompanies one of the most exuberant o- pourings of nature¿s diversity. After several years of little activity, the incredibly diverse rain forests suddenly burst into ?ower¿a phenomenon referred to as General Flowering in Asia. Plant populations are rejuvenated and animals are fed, but the process involves a delicate and complex balance. When the canopy access system was under construction at Lambir Hills - tional Park in the early 1990s, it made use of an underlying technology that was already in place: bridges. For centuries, bridges have spanned the natural chasms over rivers. This existing network of bridges and the people who built and use them produced the technology we needed to gain access to the canopy. Bridge builders were our natural allies in the quest for biological knowledge of the high canopy.

The groundbreaking canopy-access and rain forest research at Lambir Hills National Park in Sarawak, Malaysia, has contributed an immense body of knowledge. Its major studies over more than a decade are synthesized here for the first time. The focus of this unique volume is on plant-animal interactions and some of the foundations that create and maintain tropical diversity, especially pollination and the phenomenon of the General Flowering. The work discussed has implications for tropical biology, ecology and pollination studies. The power of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation events and drought, particularly in their effects on mutualisms, are discussed in detail.

Large Processes with Small Targets: Rarity and Pollination in Rain Forests.- The Canopy Biology Program in Sarawak: Scope, Methods, and Merit.- Soil-Related Floristic Variation in a Hyperdiverse Dipterocarp Forest.- Plant Reproductive Phenology and General Flowering in a Mixed Dipterocarp Forest.- A Severe Drought in Lambir Hills National Park.- The Plant-Pollinator Community in a Lowland Dipterocarp Forest.- Floral Resource Utilization by Stingless Bees (Apidae, Meliponini).- Honeybees in Borneo.- Beetle Pollination in Tropical Rain Forests.- Seventy-Seven Ways to Be a Fig: Overview of a Diverse Plant Assemblage.- Ecology of Traplining Bees and Understory Pollinators.- Vertebrate-Pollinated Plants.- Insect Predators of Dipterocarp Seeds.- Diversity of Anti-Herbivore Defenses in Macaranga.- Coevolution of Ants and Plants.- Lowland Tropical Rain Forests of Asia and America: Parallels, Convergence, and Divergence.- Lambir's Forest: The World's Most Dive Known Tree Assemblage?.- Toward the Conservation of Tropical Forests.