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Amazon River rain forest in Peru. Tropical rainforests are hot and wet. Mean monthly temperatures exceed 18 °C (64 °F) during all months of the year. [4] Average annual rainfall is no less than 1,680 mm (66 in) and can exceed 10 m (390 in) although it typically lies between 1,750 mm (69 in) and 3,000 mm (120 in). [5]
The Amazon biome has an area of 6,700,000 square kilometres (2,600,000 sq mi). [2] [a] The biome roughly corresponds to the Amazon basin, but excludes areas of the Andes to the west and cerrado (savannah) to the south, and includes lands to the northeast extending to the Atlantic ocean with similar vegetation to the Amazon basin. [2]
View of the temperate rain forest in Mount Revelstoke National Park, British Columbia, Canada. Butler, R. A. (2005) A Place Out of Time: Tropical Rainforests and the Perils They Face. Published online: Rainforests.mongabay.com; Richards, P. W. (1996). The tropical rain forest. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press ISBN 0-521-42194-2
In 2022, the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) estimated that 13.2 percent of the Amazon rainforest biome has been lost, which is an area roughly one-tenth the size of the U.S.
The biome includes several types of forests: Lowland equatorial evergreen rain forests, commonly known as tropical rainforests, are forests which receive high rainfall (tropical rainforest climate with more than 2000 mm, or 80 inches, annually) throughout the year. [5]
The Amazon rainforest, [a] also called Amazon jungle or Amazonia, is a moist broadleaf tropical rainforest in the Amazon biome that covers most of the Amazon basin of South America. This basin encompasses 7,000,000 km 2 (2,700,000 sq mi), [2] of which 6,000,000 km 2 (2,300,000 sq mi) are covered by the rainforest. [3]
Coastal mesic forests are found on the windward slopes of the major islands from sea level to 300 m (980 ft). These forests have been dominated by the native hala (Pandanus tectorius) and hau (Hibiscus tiliaceus) and naturalized (Polynesian introductions) kukui (Aleurites moluccana) and milo (Thespesia populnea) for the past 1,000–2,000 years.
The Amazon rainforest is a species-rich biome in which thousands of species live, including animals found nowhere else in the world. To date, there is at least 40,000 different kinds of plants, 427 kinds of mammals, 1,300 kinds of birds, 378 kinds of reptiles, more than 400 kinds of amphibians, and around 3,000 freshwater fish are living in Amazon.