From the text...'Apart from savannas and grasslands, wildland fire in tropical environments has received scientific scrutiny only within the past few decades. It is now widely recognized that the vast majority of wildland fires occur in the tropics and subtropics (Goldammer 1993). Because a global treatment of the effects of fire in tropical and subtropical ecosystems is beyond the scope of this volume, the reader is referred to J. G. Goldammer (1990), wherein Mueller-Dombois and Goldammer (1990) outlined generalized tropical and subtropical fire regimes. In this chapter, we focus only on fire effects in subtropical Florida, Puerto Rico, the United States Virgin Islands, and Hawaii by drawing on appropriate literature from southern Florida, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the Pacific Islands.'