Evaluating Tropical Biodiversity: Do We Need a More Refined Approach?

The exceptional biodiversity of tropical forests inspired the earliest ecologists such as H. W. Bates. Today we still strive to quantify and understand this diversity. Drawing on our own experience of Mamiraua reserve in Amazonas, which is located in an area that Bates explored, we argue that the emphasis of research in tropical ecosystems should shift away from species richness as an end in itself, and focus instead on other fundamental, but more tractable, questions that will increase our ecological understanding of these systems, support conservation management, and appeal to policy makers and society in general.