"In Manú National Park in Peru, an amazing fourteen different species of monkeys live together. That's more than in any other rainforest in the world! How can they coexist so well? Find out in this lyrical, rhyming picture book that explores each monkey's habits, diet, and home, illustrating how this delicate ecosystem and its creatures live together in harmony"--

Take a walk in the rain forest. This hot and humid biome is home to countless trees, animals, plants, and insects. Each and every insect, plant, and animal of the rain forest is dependent on all the others. Explore this exciting world of howling monkeys, calling birds, and endless rain.

Nowhere eise in the world did industrialized countries leave such early marks in the rainforest as in West Africa. Past and present developments here are in one way or the other significant for rainforests on other continents as weil. West Africa is a pioneer in both a good and a bad sense. This is reason enough to take a closer Iook at the history of moist tropical West Africa. Until recently, no one really seemed to be interested in the rainforests except for a few specialists. The world's scientific community neglected to study the incalculable riches of tropical forests, to make the public aware of them and their due importance. Although interdisciplinary research has been a popular topic for some decades now, it was not applied to just the most complex habitat on earth. Scientists from all fields studied only that which was easiest to record, seemingly blind to a myriad of details awaiting closer examination. Botanists wentabout establishing their herbariums and paid much too little attention to the vegetation as a whole, or to the significance of useful plants for local populations. Zoologists, too, busied themselves with collecting and describing species. Anthropologists, on the other hand, tended to overlook faunal details: in their ignorance of the animal world, they wrote of tigers and deer in Africa. And finally, foresters saw neither the forest nor the trees for the timber - and even confused rainforests with monocultures of fir trees.

The People of the Forest highlight the plight of the orangutan deep in the rainforests of Sabah, and other parts of Malaysia. The orangutan is the largest tree-living mammal in the world. They are facing extinction due to excessive clearance and destruction of big tracts of forests for commercial logging, legal or otherwise, plus, their own low reproductive rate which makes orangutan population excessively vulnerable to mortality. Their population just takes a long time to recover from a decline. It takes about 4 years of weaning before the young orangutan becomes independent from their mother after which she will be ready to give birth to a second young. This musical moves around a baby orangutan which is named Wira or hero. Wira grows up to be a mischievous individual which never takes 'no' for an answer, so we will follow his adventures in the rainforest with his friends, the proboscis monkey, the pygmy elephant, the mouse-deer, the Sumatran rhino, the hornbill, the clouded leopard, the Malayan tiger, the banteng, the sun bear and the tapir, all endangered species. Wira's adventures will lead him to rescue an infant female orang utan in captivity of illegal loggers in the forest. There are 13 songs in the musical. The live orchestra accompanying the play should use bamboo flutes, bamboo wind chimes, ziters, sampoton, thus capturing the rhythm of the rainforest. Roselina Khir Johari

This volume in the Greenwood Guides to Biomes of the World series covers the lush, beautiful - and rapidly shrinking - tropical forest biomes. The volume covers the two major tropic forest biomes, tropical rainforests and tropical seasonal forests.