Exploration of the rain forest canopy using airships and similar aerial platforms
Tropical rain forest canopy has been of scientific interest for about two centuries.
Alexander von Humboldt (1815) was perhaps the first scientist to write specifically about tropical forest canopy. He described the treetops of the Amazon as a "forest above a forest". Tropical rain forest canopy is full of epiphytes (or air plants) and lianas; consequently to the viewer on the ground it appears almost as if there are separate layers or strata of plantlife - one living above the other.
http://www.humboldt-foundation.de/en/stiftung/namenspatron/index.htm
Professor William Beebe who is famous for his deep ocean dives in a Bathyshere with Otis Barton, spent many years studying the flora and fauna of Guyana. In 1917 he wrote: "Yet another continent of life remains to be discovered, not upon the Earth, but one or two hundred feet above it, extending over thousands of square miles..."
http://home.aol.com/chines6930/mw1/bio.htm
Today we know that the canopy of tropical rain forests represents one of the richest biomes on Earth. It has been described as the "high frontier", a zone that is difficult to access, but where millions of species coexist, including epiphytes (air plants), lianas, bromeliads, monkeys, birds, frogs, ants, beetles and even earthworms.
See,e.g., http://www.daversitycode.com/earthscope/
Professor E. O. Wilson has written:
"We may think that the world has been explored. Almost all the mountains and rivers, it is true, have been named, the coast and geodetic surveys completed, the ocean floor mapped to the deepest trenches, the atmosphere transected and chemically analyzed. The planet is now continuously monitored from space by satellites; and, not least, Antarctica, the last virgin continent, has become a research station and expensive tourist shop. The biosphere, however, remains obscure. Even though some 1.4 million species of organisms have been discovered (in the minimal sense of having specimens collected and formal scientific name attached), the total number alive on earth is somewhere between 10 and 100 million. No one can say with confidence which of these figures are closer." E. O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life, 1994.
http://www.unl.edu/museum/research/entomology/workers/EWilson.htm
