Tropical,
or rainforest
The rainforest is the most ecologically rich of the world's
biomes. Rainforest occupy only 75 of earth's land areas
and are generally found at the equatorial
level of the planet.
Daylight in the rainforest lasts for 12 hours, there is no
winter, and the seasons
can best be described as rainy, or dry, with
little change in temperature. The rainforest is host to
the largest variety of life forms in all of nature, with
thousands of different species of trees, plants, flowers,
mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, invertebrates and
micro-organisms. Many of the animals in the rainforest are
highly adapted to their highly competitive and diverse
environment, having developed camouflage or strong defenses,
which are always heralded by colorful markings.
While the rainforest isn't ideally suited for human
habitation, it has been the home of tribes such as the Yanomamo
in South-America, and Pamagirri in Australia. Perhaps,
they too have survived by adapting to their environment, but it
is the so-called civilized world which poses the biggest
threat to the rainforest, aggressive logging, and
clearcutting to make way for plantations have endangered the
rain forest's animal and plant life, and brought on irreparable
damage to the earth's atmosphere. Close to 80,000
acres of rainforest are destroyed each year, and over
50,000 species of life forms become extinct.
Find
out what you can do to help preserve this important biome.
The other forests which fall into
the rainforest category are the seasonal rainforest, with
it's very humid tropical area subject to a short dry season, the
evergreen rainforest, which does not have a dry season, the
monsoon rainforest, where the dry season is prolonged in
proportion to the lower amount of rain, and finally, the
semi-evergreen rainforest, which is similar to the seasonal
rainforest, but has a longer dry season.
Further subdivisions of this group are determined by seasonal distribution of
rainfall.
