book reviews ISSN 1948-6596 A global view of agroforestry Agroforestry – The Future of Global Land Use. P.K. Ramachandran Nair & Dennis Garrity (editors), 2012, Springer, 531 pp. £126 (hardback) ISBN 978-94-007-4675-6; http://www.springer.com Both P.K.R. Nair and D. Gar- rity, the editors of this book, have been major promoters of agroforestry worldwide for several decades, and for that they deserve credit. This book is one of their recent efforts towards this aim. The book is organised into three parts. It is unique in the sense that the first of the three parts is entirely dedicated to six keynote speeches made by world leaders at the 2 nd World Congress of Agroforestry (WCA2), June 2009. The speeches, although not well suited to the thematic mode and style of disciplinary books, make essential contributions to the discipline of agroforestry. They address many of the most seri- ous land-management challenges that the world is currently facing and present agroforestry as a ro- bust, science-based land-management approach to fight hunger and poverty and restore environ- mental resilience. The remaining two parts are made up of 18 peer-reviewed thematic chapters. Seven of them address “Global Perspectives” (Section II). All were produced by lead organisers of WCA2 symposia, who are well known in the field of agroforestry, with inputs from other presenters in their respec- tive symposia. The remaining 11 chapters are on “Regional Perspectives” (Section III). All were pro- duced by leading professionals currently spear- heading significant agroforestry-related initiatives worldwide. Thus, the book presents a comprehen- sive and authoritative account of agroforestry to- day. Also, the contents of several of the thematic chapters are on topics that have not been pre- sented much in the agroforestry literature. The third section presents a range of topics related to agroforestry development in regions including Africa, Latin America, South Asia, Japan, Europe, Canada and the United States. Although most of the continents are covered, at least one chapter based on one of the countries of Oceania would have made the book more comprehensive and complete—Australia, in particular, has a very rich experience of agroforestry. Even so, the edi- tors have managed to assemble an excellent col- lection of studies and reviews on agroforestry around the world, encompassing both developed and developing countries. The final chapter, a conclusion by the two editors, presents carefully thought-out strategic and forward-looking suggestions to be pursued for realizing the promise of agroforestry in the future. They have to be commended for making the extra effort to outline such pathways and directions, instead of just reviewing past work. In summary, the book is well written, beau- tifully produced and contains a wealth of informa- tion on agroforestry today. The quality of plates and figures is excellent. It also has a good index and a comprehensive list of references. All the chapters are of high quality, containing detailed, state-of-the-art, up-to-date information on the different topics of interest to a broader, multidis- ciplinary audience. The book is presented in a for- mat which will be understandable to the general reader. It will be most useful as a general refer- ence for information on agroforestry worldwide today, and on the prospects for agroforestry in future global land use. It is of interest to anyone engaged in the practice of agroforestry, forestry or agriculture. The book is also useful as a text- book. Therefore, I recommend it to both under- graduates and postgraduate students of agrofor- estry, forestry, agriculture, ecology or biology, and that a copy of the book is purchased for institu- tional libraries. Zewge Teklehaimanot School of Environment, Natural Resources and Geography, Bangor University, UK. z.teklehaimanot@bangor.ac.uk Edited by Markus Eichhorn frontiers of biogeography 5.3, 2013 — © 2013 the authors; journal compilation © 2013 The International Biogeography Society