Jungles And Rain Forests 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.

Temperate rain forests, growing in higher-latitude regions having wet,

maritime climates, are less extensive than those of the tropics but include

some of the most valuable timber in the world. Notable forests in this

category are those on the northwest coast of North America, in southern

Chile, in Tasmania, and in parts of southeastern Australia and New Zealand.

These forests contain trees that may exceed in height those of tropical

rain forests, but there is less diversity of species. Conifers such as

REDWOOD and Sitka spruce tend to predominate in North America, while their

counterparts in the southern hemisphere include various species of

EUCALYPTUS, Araucaria, and Nothofagus (Antarctic beech).

Ecology

Rain forests cover less than six percent of the Earth’s total land surface,

but they are the home for up to three-fourths of all known species of

plants and animals; undoubtedly they also contain many more species as yet

undiscovered. Recent studies suggest that this great diversity of species

is related to the apparently dynamic and unstable nature of rain forests

over geologic time. The fact is that despite their appearance of fertile

abundance, rain forests are fragile ecosystems. Their soils can quickly

lose the ability to support most forms of vegetation once the forest cover

is removed, and some soils even turn into hard LATERITE clay. The effect of

forest removal on local climates is also often profound, although the role

of rain forests in world climatic changes is not yet clear.

Humans and Rain Forests

Throughout history, human beings have encroached on rain forests for living

space, timber, and agricultural purposes. In vast portions of upland

tropical forest, for example, the practice of “shifting cultivation” has

caused deterioration of the primary forest. In this primitive system of

agriculture, trees are killed in small plots that are cropped for two or

three seasons and then abandoned; if the plots are again cultivated before

primary vegetation has reestablished itself, the result is a progressive

deterioration of the forest, leading to coarse grass or jungle. Lowland

forests are similarly being reduced in many areas; on the island of Java,

the lowland primary forest has been almost totally removed and replaced

with rice fields or plantation crops such as rubber. In the 20th century

these incursions on rain forests have grown rapidly, and numerous

organizations are now attempting to reduce the rate of the loss.

Bibliography: Caufield, Catherine, In the Rainforest (1985); Forsyth,

Adrian, and Miyata, Ken, Tropical Nature: Life and Death in the Rain

Forests of Central and South America (1984); Sutton, S. L., et al.,

Tropical Rain Forest: Ecology and Management (1984); Whitmore, T. C.,

Tropical Rain Forests of the Far East, 2d. ed. (1984).