The South China Sea, making up about 3,400,000 sq km of the Western Pacific Ocean, including more than 200 coral islets, and extending from the equator near Singapore to the Tropic of Cancer, is an area with significant biodiversity. This book is a good introduction to that diversity and opens with 2 short chapters - one on the state of marine biodiversity in the South China Sea, the second on the island disputes in the region. These are followed by 14 chapters on the biota. One of these is a bibliography on plants, the other 13 contain checklists of a number of the major taxa occurring in the region.