While studying tropical ecology in the early 1980s I became fascinated by the intriguing lectures Tom van der Hammen and Antoine Cleef gave on the exuberance of cloud forests in the Tropics – it all sounded so magical, mythical, Shakespearean even; it seemed like one was part of the story of Macbeth, observing the three witches disappearing in the mist! I felt privileged when my teachers in Amsterdam subsequently sent me out to Colombia and Costa Rica to study the structure and composition of a special kind of tropical montane forests, the highland oak forests of the American Tropics.

I felt even more fortunate when colleagues at Costa Rica's Universidad Nacional took me out to get to know the cloud forest paradise of Monteverde. Just like Nalini Nadkarni and Nathaniel Wheelwright, who, back in the year 2000, edited their amazing book on the ecology and conservation of this lush cloud forest preserve, I was amazed by the extraordinary richness and complexity of the gnarled elfin woodlands at Monteverde. Only then did I begin to grasp the tremendous diversity of the different kinds of tropical mountain forests; whilst the Monteverde cloud forest has a relatively low stature, the Talamancan oak forests harbor trees reaching over 50 m tall. This sense of diversity and complexity became even stronger after visiting montane cloud forests in Puerto Rico, southern Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, northern Argentina, and Cuba – all these places belonging to only one continent.