An Atlas of the World's Conifers: An Analysis of Their Distribution, Biogeography, Diversity and Conservation Status

As a professional vegetation scientist, I am involved with alpine forests. I need to have an overview of which conifer trees grow where on the planet. The text of this book contains an enormous wealth of information with regard to range and habitat of all conifer species. It is exactly what I need as a reference. The Atlas is divided into geographic regions, continents and subdivided in parts of the continents or large islands. These seem to follow the distributional patterns of the various species. The explanations of the species ranges really take advantage of this kind of breaking up the book into its subdivisions.There are more than 700 maps, all of them as small insets in the text. Having bought an "Atlas" I had an erroneous notion of large scale maps that fill whole pages, with lots of symbols for different species on it. The way the maps ar set into the text for each species, they are rather an add on to the text information. This makes comparison of different species distributions a bit difficult. The book would benefit from the cooperation with a professional cartographer who might find ways to produce large scale maps that synthesize information.There are numerous color images placed into the text the same as the maps. The images are informative and not just niceties to make the book colourful. The information I gain from the images is helpful to understand points made in the text. However, the color reproduction of this iamges is really poor. Being Swiss and used to high quality coffee-table books, these flaws in the colour reproduction really hurt my eyes. I wonder who did the color correction for the print. Did these people ever hear about color management and the like? Really, for the next edition this book I would very much like to see it worked over by a professional lithographer.The color reproduction is the reason why I only give four stars. Again, just to make the point clear: This book is made up of 80% text going into details, written in a clear, concise style by an experienced author who knows how to help along an avid reader who is not expert in the field. 10% of the book's pages are covered by the very many small maps and another 10% show images. I am truly happy to have found this volume as a reference. My own studies will greatly benefit from it.