The Carbon Balance of Forest Biomes provides an informed synthesis on the current status of forests and their future potential for carbon sequestration. This volume is timely, since convincing models which scale from local to regional carbon fluxes are needed to support these international agreements, whilst criticisms have been levelled at existing empirical approaches. One key question is to determine how well eddy-flux measurements at the stand-level represent regional-scale processes. This may be related to specific management practices (age, plantation, fertilisation) or simple bias in choosing representative sites (ease of access, roughness, proximity to physical barriers). The ecology and regeneration state of temperate, tropical and boreal forests under current climatic conditions are discussed, together with partitioning of photosynthetic and respiratory fluxes from soils and vegetation. The volume considers how to integrate contrasting methodologies, and the latest approaches for scaling from stand to the planetary boundary layer.