Jungle And Rain Forest Essay, Research Paper
Jungle and rain forest are terms that are often used
synonymously but with little precision. The more meaningful and
restrictive of these terms is rain forest, which refers to the
climax or primary forest in regions with high rainfall (greater
than 1.8 m/70 in per year), chiefly but not exclusively found
in the tropics. Rain forests are significant for their valuable
timber resources, and in the tropics they afford sites for
commercial crops such as rubber, tea, coffee, bananas, and
sugarcane. They also include some of the last remaining areas
of the Earth that are both unexploited economically and
inadequately known scientifically. The term jungle originally referred to the
tangled, brushy vegetation of lowlands in India, but it has
come to be used for any type of tropical forest or woodland.
The word is more meaningful if limited to the dense, scrubby
vegetation that develops when primary rain forest has been
degraded by destructive forms of logging or by cultivation
followed by abandonment.Types of Rain Forest
Rain forests may be grouped into two major types: tropical and
temperate. Tropical rain forest is characterized by broadleaf
evergreen trees forming a closed canopy, an abundance of vines
and epiphytes (plants growing on the trees), a relatively open
forest floor, and a very large number of species of both plant
and animal life. The largest trees have buttressed trunks and
emerge above the continuous canopy, while smaller trees
commonly form a layer of more shade-tolerant species beneath
the upper canopy. The maximum height of the upper canopy of
tropical rain forests is generally about 30 to 50 m (100 to 165
ft), with some individual trees rising as high as 60 m (200 ft)
above the forest floor.
The largest areas of tropical rain forest are in the Amazon
basin of South America, in the Congo basin and other lowland
equatorial regions of Africa, and on both the mainland and the
islands off Southeast Asia, where they are especially abundant
on Sumatra and New Guinea. Small areas are found in Central
America and along the Queensland coast of Australia.