For about 40 years 1 have been engaged in timberline research. Thus, one could suppose that writing this book should not have been too difficult. It was harder, however, than expected, and in the end 1 feIt that more questions had arisen than could be answered within its pages. Perhaps it would have been easier to write the book twenty years aga and then leave the subject to mature. But the late Prof. Heinz Ellenberg convinced me to portray a much needed and complete pieture of what we know of the timberline with special respect to its great physiognomie, structural and ecological variety. The first version of this book was published in the German language (Holt­ meier, 2000). An extensive summary and translated figure and photo cap­ tions and table headings were added to enable non-German speaking people to make use of the book as weIl. Nevertheless, 1 was very delighted when Prof. Martin Beniston encouraged me to prepare an English edition for the series "Advances in Global Change Research", which will guarantee a wider circulation.