Reef, published by Dorling Kindersly, features high quality photography from Scubazoo, a group of underwater photographers in Malaysia.Stunning satellite imagery illuminates Our Changing Planet: The View from Space.The Last Wild Wolves: Ghosts of the Rain Forest is a portrait of Canada’s North Pacific wolves, photographed by Ian McAllister. American Waters documents three years of unusual waterscapes around the United States shot by photographer Alex Kirkbrid.A photographic journey, America the Beautiful features some of the world’s best photographers in some of America’s most beautiful locales. Sebastian Copeland’s Antarctica: The Global Warning documents climate change on this unique landscape. Bird is a must-have for any serious ornithologist on your gift list. America: An Illustrated History has more than 500 images, from drawings of the first contacts with Native Americans to a photograph illustrating global warming.

Providence Journal photos/ Sandor Bodo

This year’s crop of coffee-table books is a little unsettling. Like the stock market, their subjects tend to reflect the sum of our hopes and fears. And in the one category that until now provided a reliable respite from our daily follies and cares — the natural world — fear seems to be gaining the upper hand.

The titles tell the story: Global Warming: The Last Chance for Change, by Paul Brown (Reader’s Digest Books, 320 pages, $29.95); Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming is Changing the World, by Gary Braasch (University of California Press, 267 pages, $34.95); Our Changing Planet: The View From Space, edited by Michael D. King, Clair L. Parkinson, Kim C. Partington and Robin G. Williams (Cambridge University Press, 390 pages, $45); The Last Wild Wolves: Ghosts of the Rain Forest, by Ian McAllister (California, 192 pages, $39.95); Antarctica: The Global Warning, by Sebastian Copeland (Earth Aware, 198 pages, $55) . . . The list goes on.

My favorite is called simply Reef, by Scubazoo, which turns out to be a small diving collective based in Malaysia (360 pages, $40). It is published by DK Publishing, known for the high quality of its art and photography books. Here the reader is torn between gloom over the undeniable fragility of the reef environment and the death-by-pollution of so many of them around the world on the one hand, and delight in the sheer dazzling beauty of this fascinating alien world on the other. The reef inhabitants, and the reefs themselves, seem conjured by some impish, otherworldly wizard with an eye for the fantastic and absurd, and scant regard for Darwinian practicalities. The photography (augmented by video from a CD that comes with the book) is crisp, colorful and sometimes just short of sublime.

Another underwater book, this one more whimsy than warning, is American Waters, by professional photographer Alex Kirkbride (D&C, 192 pages, $30). It is a strange and occasionally wonderful book, starting with the cover: an underwater collection of shovels and rakes, each standing upright in the sand or mud at the bottom of Lake McDonald, Glacier National Park, Mont. No explanation, rational or not, is given. Kirkbride’s “Grand Idea,” as he describes it in a preface, was to travel coast to coast with his diving gear and capture images from beneath the waters somewhere in all 50 states. (Rhode Island’s entry is a prosaic school of baitfish.)

The result ranges from high art (two glistening dolphins in the waters off Maui, Hawaii) to low comedy (a seaweed-bedecked dentist’s chair, complete with a rinsing basin, at the bottom of Blue Springs, in Waldron, Ind.).

Turning their attention to other endangered creatures, the editors at DK published Birds (512 pages, $50), which, unlike Reef, is designed as an encyclopedia on the subject, but has the same superb level of photography. A must for any ornithologist on your gift list who has resisted the temptation to buy it (it came out in August). Both birds and reef-dwellers are in peril, and these books serve notice that to lose them would be a great shame.

The Amazon is another fragile area, but whether a reader would be left with the same feeling after looking at Wild Amazon: A photographer’s incredible journey, by the late Nick Gordon (Evans Mitchell Books, 167 pages, $34.95), is problematical.

Gordon, a British wildlife photographer and filmmaker, is best known for his 2001 film, Jaguar — Eater of Souls, and for taking chances. This is his final book, completed before his death in 2004. It contains scenes from that film and many other images of the jungle’s often-beautiful, often-frightening wildlife. If you are intrigued by Gordon’s discussion of eating a roasted tarantula (it tasted a bit like crab, he thought, as the native shaman with him picked up one of its fangs and used it as a toothpick), this is the book for you. Gordon died, by the way, while filming tarantulas — not from a bite but from a heart attack.

We are on safer and more familiar ground with America the Beautiful, a visual paean to this land of ours published by Life Books (144 pages, $29.95), which pays a special compliment to Rhode Island: The back cover is shared, improbably, by a bucolic scene on Block Island and glowing lava from a volcano in Hawaii.

The editors of Life magazine have chosen 100 beautiful places, photographed by some of the world’s best photographers — including the legendary Ansel Adams, whose iconic black-and-white image of the Snake River with the Grand Tetons in the background is included as a separate print, suitable for framing. Regardless of politics, you wouldn’t want to know anyone who could come away from these pages without renewed pride in his native or chosen country.

Not to be outdone by its sister publication, the editors of Time magazine created America: An Illustrated History (266 pages, $39.95), which is just that, from drawings of Europeans’ first contacts with native Americans to a photograph on the final pages illustrating — here it is again — global warming. Many of the iconic images are here, from the only photo of Lincoln at Gettysburg to the 9/11 attack. But most of them you’ve never seen before, and they are fascinating to anyone with even a modicum of interest in our nation’s past.

Given our current preoccupation with America’s Founding Fathers and the Revolutionary era in general, a book like Houses of the Founding Fathers: The Men Who Made America and the Way They Lived (Artisan, 354 pages, $50) was almost inevitable. This one, by architectural historian Hugh Howard and photographer Roger Straus III, has the additional advantage of being quite splendid, lavish in both image and anecdote and devoting several pages to each of its 40 houses and their famous inhabitants. Providence’s Stephen Hopkins House is one of them.

The Beautiful People and how they live is a perennial coffee-table-book topic, of course. The flagship in that category this year (drum roll and red carpet, please) is Vogue Living: Houses, Gardens, People (Knopf, 383 pages, $75). Here are 36 of the world’s most opulent dwellings and their owners, mined mostly from the pages of Vogue and Vogue Living by Hamish Bowles, Vogue Living’s editor-in-chief. Reader interest is likely. Envy is guaranteed. To avoid culture shock, it might be wise not to read this one in the same sitting with the book about the Founding Fathers.

You’ll find more Beautiful People (and a few who aren’t even pretty) in The Society Portrait: From David to Warhol, by Gabriel Badea-Paun (The Vendome Press, 223 pages, $75) — 200 full-color reproductions, some (Francisco Goya’s The Duchess of Alba, John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X) more familiar than others. But the point here is not the subjects but the artists and the directions their art has taken in the last 250 years, as ably set forth by art historian Badea-Paun.

A New England Autumn: A Sentimental Journey, by Ferenc MátÉ (Norton, 160 pages, $39.95) is a regional book with (justifiably) broader ambitions — achingly beautiful photographs interspersed with appropriate quotations from Frost, Dickinson, Thoreau, Plath and others, to help us see more deeply. There’s even a practical state-by-state tour guide.

But why, you might ask, would Ferenc MátÉ, a photographer with a worldwide reputation who lives in a 13th-century friary in Tuscany and runs a winery there, bother with falling leaves in New England? Ah, but to raise the question is to reveal the truth of the old adage about familiarity and contempt. Each October, we New Englanders dwell amid world-class splendor, unavailable even in Tuscan vineyards. MátÉ knew.

Finally, though far from the prettiest, and perhaps among the least challenging in terms of execution, the picture book I lingered over longest among the dozens that crossed my desk this year was 100 Days in Photographs: Pivotal Events that Changed the World, by Nick Yapp (National Geographic, 319 pages, $35). One hundred key historic events in human history, from the opening of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (when photography was in its infancy) to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Here are wars, assassinations, disasters — but also the first flight at Kitty Hawk, the conquest of Everest, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the release of Nelson Mandela. Many images are familiar, many are not. And some (exactly which ones will differ from person to person) will amaze you because you have always known the event happened, but had never realized it had been photographed! They may not alter your worldview, but they will surely broaden it. And isn’t that what all these books are about?

driggs@projo.com