Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
[1] [2] Tropical rainforest climate zones (Af). Tropical forests: from the UN FRA2000 report. Tropical rainforests are dense and warm rainforests with high rainfall typically found between 10° north and south of the Equator. They are a subset of the tropical forest biome that occurs roughly within the 28° latitudes (in the torrid zone between ...
A tropical rainforest typically has a number of layers, each with different plants and animals adapted for life in that particular area. Examples include the emergent, canopy, understory and forest floor layers. [19] [20]
The third layer is the lower tree area. These trees tend to be around five to ten meters high and tightly compacted. The trees found in the third layer are young trees trying to grow into the larger canopy trees. The fourth layer is the shrub layer beneath the tree canopy. This layer is mainly populated by sapling trees, shrubs, and seedlings.
The canopy can be divided into five layers: overstory canopy with emergent crowns, a medium layer of canopy, lower canopy, shrub level, and finally understory. [1] [3] [4] The canopy is home to many of the forest's animals, including apes and monkeys. Below the canopy, a lower understory hosts snakes and big cats.
The canopy is taller than the understory layer. The canopy holds 90% of the animals in the rainforest. Canopies can cover vast distances and appear to be unbroken when observed from an airplane. However, despite overlapping tree branches, rainforest canopy trees rarely touch each other. Rather, they are usually separated by a few feet.
A Sapele tree in the Republic of the Congo. The Congolian rainforest is the world's second-largest tropical forest, after the Amazon rainforest.It covers over 500,000,000 acres (2,000,000 km 2) across six countries and contains a quarter of the world's remaining tropical forest.
Most of the interior of the Amazon basin is covered by rainforest. [6] The dense tropical Amazon rainforest is the largest tropical rainforest in the world. [2] It covers between 5,500,000 and 6,200,000 square kilometres (2,100,000 and 2,400,000 sq mi) of the 6,700,000 to 6,900,000 square kilometres (2,600,000 to 2,700,000 sq mi) Amazon biome.
For comparison, a tropical rainforest biome may contain thousands of tree species, but this is not to say mangrove forests lack diversity. Though the trees are few in species, the ecosystem that these trees create provides a habitat for a great variety of other species, including as many as 174 species of marine megafauna .