DIFFERENT TYPES OF TROPICAL FOREST

Roughly two thirds of all the world's forests are in the Tropics, the area between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. Abundant growth is generally more prolific in the areas furthest away from the frozen poles. This huge area that encircles our planet is best known for its rainforests with the green flourishing, steamy jungles and towering trees, with dense lower levels of smaller trees, shrubs, and vines.

Tropical forests are surprisingly assorted.   In addition to the rainforest there are also mangroves, wet forests, dry forests, swamps and savannas and wetlands.  This long list however, gives only a slight indication of the true multiplicity of the Natural World of vegetation.  One study by the Food and Agriculture Organization, [ FAO ], a department of the the United Nations, considered over 20 countries in tropical America, and nearly 40 tropical Africa, and 15 in tropical Asia. They recognized a myriad of different types of tropical forests, such as, broadleaved trees, open and closed canopy forests,  and conifer forests, with closed forests and mixed forest grasslands, and declining forests where crop growing agriculture has made substantial inroads.

The major remaining areas of Tropical Rainforest are in Brazil, Indonesia, Congo and Malaysia. Rainfall generally exceeds 60 inches, that is about150 cm each year and can be as high as 400 inches or 1000 cm. Lowland rainforest are among the world's most fruitful of green plant natural production. Enormous trees can grow to 200 feet, that is 60 m in height, whilst supporting thousands of other species of plants and small animals. Mountain rainforest grows at high elevations where the climate is too windy and wet for most advantageous tree growth.

Mangrove forests grow in the swampy, tidal-regions; a no-man's land between water bodies and the shore. They are regularly considered part of the rainforest composite. Roots of mangrove trees help also to stabilize the shoreline and trap sediment and decaying foliage that play a part in this ecosystem production.

Most huge areas of tropical Dry Forests are found in Australia, India, Central and South America, the Caribbean, Mexico, Africa, and Madagascar. Dry forests by virtue of their name receive low rainfall each year and this is around 15 inches or 38 cm. They are thus so named and accommodate species evolved to be acclimatized to meager rainfall. Trees of dry tropical forests are usually smaller than those in rainforests, and many lose their leaves during the dry season. Although they are still remarkably varied, dry forests often have fewer species than rainforests per se and plants are miniatures of larger cousins. We must ask ourselves what are the best conditions for well sustained life.

Savanna is a transitional group of trees between forest and grassland; the Savanna replaced many forests when the climate changed after the last ice-age. Here, vegetation struggle for moisture and nutrition and are often quite scattered and tend to be evolved to cope with grazing, dry periods and sporadic bushfires.

Bushfires are obviously much more widespread in the dry season but if fire does not happen, trees eventually will begin to grow again and the savanna is converted back to dry forest. Such is the fine line between survival and death, conversely with too much fire or grazing, dry forest becomes Savanna. 

Changes not only in environment but in the different types of environment are caused through a various number of reasons that takes in all elements of evolution. Humanity's hand in the unnatural destruction of the rainforest can only lead to humanity's own possible destruction, or at least a scenario very near to an Extinction Level Event.

The destruction of the Rainforest will vastly increase carbon dioxide levels, polluting the atmosphere . At present the Amazon and other forests along with the oceans just barely soak up all the fossil fuel carbons which we produce as it is. 

Extinction Level Event.

Countless Billions of tons of carbon dioxides are stored in a myriad of ways, one of the most significant is in the vegetation of the rainforest. But the gradual increase of the greenhouse gases will raise the temperature of the planet. 

[The year 2000 was a warmer year than 1998, which was the record then.]  

As the Earth's climate warms there is a great danger that the Rainforest will get less seasonal rain and actually go through a yet unforeseen unprecedented dry season.

If this happens the carbon-dioxide absorption process will stop; the vegetation Photosynthesis  will stop and leaves will fall and carbon dioxide levels will increase significantly, increasing Global Warming that will again make this new dry season longer, and BANG!!!       The balance will tip.

By 2050 scientists around the World have declared that the balance will be overturned and our home world will be thrust into a time when temperatures will be some 15 degrees hotter than now. Ice at the poles will melt and methane that lies at the bottom of deep cold oceans in a billion tons of sediment will be released adding to the increasing problem. In geological terms this consequence has been expressed as being INSTANTANEOUS.

Ironically, due to the raised temperatures, ocean currents will slow to nothing and this will place us into an Ice Age within 30 years. And Humanity will almost be wiped out.

On May 13, 2002, Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri called for a temporary moratorium on logging in Indonesia in an effort to halt illegal logging and save what's left of the country's remaining forests. According to the World Bank, Indonesia will lose all of its forests in the next 15 years if the government does not act quickly and strongly against deforestation activities.

According to the World Resources Institute, Indonesia has lost forty percent, or 64 million hectares, of its original forest cover in the last fifty years. The rate of deforestation is accelerating, from 1 million hectares destroyed each year in the 1980s to a current 2 million hectares' loss per year. Indonesia's lowland forests harbor the country's highest biodiversity and timber value. At current rates of forest loss, the region of Sumatra's lowland forest will be gone by 2005, and Kalimantan's lowland forest will have been devastated by 2010.Citigroup, North America's largest financial institution and RAN campaign target, is a key financial backer of Indonesian rainforest destruction via palm oil plantations and pulp and paper operations. It is business partners with Indonesian palm oil company, London Sumatra (Lon Sum), a company that has been implicated in bulldozing and burning vast areas of forests, as well as violating the human rights of indigenous peoples. Citi-group is also a top investor in Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), one of Indonesia's largest and most destructive pulp and paper operators. American consumers also play a central role in the destruction of Indonesian forests. Major forest products distributors such as Boise, Georgia Pacific, and Home Depot profit from Indonesian forests' devastation. Woods such as Lauan and Ramin from these forests permeate the American market in the forms of plywood, tool handles, flooring, and furniture.

VALUE OF TROPICAL FORESTS

All forests have some value, both economic and ecological. The Global Environment, factored with Ecology, which is the study of the relations of organisms to one another and to their surroundings, is the most important continuing situation that we have to take into account when thinking about the rainforest. But as a whole group, we do not;  Humanity's destruction of the world's natural eco-base will be our biggest repentance and it is not that far away when we will all realize this.

Three thousand acres of life-giving, oxygen producing plants are eaten away by some circumstance every hour of every day. That is FIVE acres destroyed for financial gain every time this clock sweeps by. And it will NEVER Stop !!!!

In the short term tropical rainforests are very important to the global economy. The rainforest covers just over 5% of the Earth's land area, but contain the greatest majority of the world's plant and animal genetic resources. The multiplicity of life is astounding and species run in the billions worldwide. 

It has been discovered that the rainforest of Puerto Rico, to name but one group, includes more than 550 species of trees in 70 different botanical families.

In any rainforest there is a diversity of other life forms, shrubbery, grasses, herbs, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, not forgetting bacteria and other micro-species. A rainforest, one inquiry suggested is that the tropical rainforest may contain as many as 40 million different kinds of plants and animals, most of which are scarily insects. Globally, if we could weigh all insects and all humans, it would be found that insects have up to FOUR times the massed body weight to that of humans. Come the Extinction Level Event, what species will remain to proliferate our planet?

Wood and Other Products

The main and most obvious reason that the rainforest is being cut down at about one acre each second is that it bestows upon us many valuable harvests, that include rubber, fruits, nuts, meat, rattan for making cane like furniture, medicinal products, floral greenery, timber, fire-wood, and beauty. Rainforest areas abound with such wealth and not only are they utilized by natives hunting and fishing, they also make available income and jobs, for hundreds of millions of people in small, medium, and large industries around the world.

Tropical forests are noted for their beautiful woods; four important commercial woods are mahogany, teak, melina, and okoume. 

Indians.

Tropical forests are habitat for tribal hunter-gatherers and there have been many different tribes; they are usually called Indians or indigenous natives. Nobody knows for sure how or when these original inhabitants arrived, maybe they have always been there. There are upwards of a thousand or more forest tribes around the world and their lifestyle has been relatively unchanged for centuries. Many are now close to extinction. Circa 1900, Brazil had over one million Indians but today, there are less than 200,000. Nearly 100 of these human communities living in the rainforest have just disappeared;  that is one tribe per year.  They are usually hunter-gatherers or hunter-gardeners, and depend on the forests for their livelihood, water, fuel and other wealth. They build their homes from saplings, sticks, mud and leaves. They have their own religious beliefs and customs. 

Many medicines and drugs come from the tropical rainforests, found only in plants found there. Some of the best known are, quinine, a drug used for malaria; curare, an anesthetic and muscle relaxant that can paralyze, and sometimes used in surgery; and rosy periwinkle, a treatment for Hodgkin's disease and leukemia. Research has identified many other potential chemicals that may have future value in treating many other maladies such as arthritis, hepatitis, insect stings, fever, coughs, and colds. Many more maybe there but are still undiscovered. Think how many new species of plants have been destroyed by deforestation and think what potential those chemical bearing plants might have had.

Environmental Benefits

Tropical rainforest does more than counter to local climatic conditions; rainforest also influence the climate. Through transpiration, the massive amount of vegetation in rainforests restore huge amounts of water back into the atmosphere. This increases precipitation and humidity, and also cools the air for miles around. Using the process of photosynthesis tropical forests replenish the air by breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen. By changing carbon they help keep the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels low and actually and ironically work against the global "greenhouse" effect.

photosynthesis The chemical process by which green plants synthesize organic compounds from carbon dioxide and water in the presence of sunlight. It occurs in the *chloroplasts (most of which are in the leaves) and there are two principal series of reactions. In the light reactions, which require the presence of light, energy from sunlight is absorbed by *photosynthetic pigments (chiefly the green pigment *chlorophyll) and converted into chemical energy. In the ensuing dark reactions, which can take place either in light or darkness, this chemical energy is used in the production of simple organic compounds from carbon dioxide and water. Further chemical reactions convert these compounds into chemicals useful to the plant. Photosynthesis can be summarized by the equation:

CO2 + 2H2O ? [CH2O] + H2O + O2

Since virtually all other forms of life are directly or indirectly dependent on plants for food, photosynthesis is the basis for all life on earth. Furthermore virtually all the atmospheric oxygen has originated from oxygen released during photosynthesis.

Forests also regulate water flow in streams and rivers. Trees slow down the potential deluge of tropical downpours. They hold the water in abeyance, stored in their trunks and leaves but also on the leaves themselves. water is also slowed down by soaking into the soil, when trees are cleared, rainfall runs off the land more quickly, contributing to floods and greater erosion.

DEFORESTATION

Prior to the dawn of agriculture about 8,000 years BC, forests and open woodland covered about 15 billion acres of the land globe. Over these millennia over 30% of natural forest has been lost. According to a 1982 study by FAO, about  30 million acres of tropical forests are cut each year; this is nearly an acre every second.

FIVE ACRES OF RAINFOREST GONE AT EVERY SWEEP

Reasons for Deforestation

There are many reasons why the rainforest is being depleted at such a phenomenal rate. The first is logging for timber; rainforest to the greater extent has taken many decades to grow and a huge tree holds a lot of very value wood. But you cannot use a tree in its original state it has to be trimmed and processed. Raw wood trimmed into an appropriate shape can be sold off very lucratively and all the waste material can be used for fuel for burning. The space left can be turned into agricultural land and used to grow crops but usually it is used to grow grass. Cattle are then grazed on this land to grow beef, but the cattle can be voracious as there are usually too many cattle to the acre than is resourceful and the land can be eventually laid bare. The land is then left fallow and falls into a dry savanna like state. It is very difficult and would take much needed money and time to return these areas back to rainforest.

Forced change to a sedentary agricultural state is an even greater threat to tropical forests. Today immense areas that once supported the rainforest are now mostly occupied by poor farmers and ranchers or by commercial farmers who produce sugar, cocoa, palm oil, and other products.

In many equatorial countries there is a serious shortage of firewood. For millions of rural poor, some survival depends on finding enough wood to cook the daily meal. Every day more of the forest is destroyed, and the distance from home to the wood fuel increases. Not only do people endure by having to spend much of the time in the just searching for fuel, but the whole area suffers also. 

Harm is greatest in dry tropical forests where firewood collecting converts more forest to savanna and grasslands.

The international demand for tropical hardwoods runs at around ten billion dollars each year. This just exacerbates an ever growing problem. It even resembles the poacher who kills a great elephant just to steal its ivory tusks. 

We are stealing trees for wood, and that is killing a planet.

Endangered Wildlife

The Rainforest is a naturally intertwined ecosystem of foliage and flora based around the tree. A multi-system that has evolved in accord over millions of years. The worldwide loss of the rainforest encompassing thousands of species of birds, insects and animals that are threatened with extinction is an obscenity at the very least. 

Orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) are totally dependent on small and isolated piece of land within the tropical forest that still remain in Borneo and Sumatra, Indonesia. Orangutans live most of their lives perched in the forest canopy where they feed on leaves, figs, nuts and other fruit, and insects. Old large trees of the forest support woody vines that serve as aerial ladders, this allows the animals to move about, build their nests, and forage for food. When the old forests are cut, orangutans disappear.

The largest of all primates, the gorilla, is one of man's closest relatives in the animal kingdom. Too large and clumsy to move about in the forest canopy, the gorilla lives on the forest floor where it forages for a variety of plant materials. Loss of tropical forests in central and west Africa is a major reason for the decreasing numbers of mountain gorillas (Gorilla gorilla). Some habitat has been secured, but the future of this gentle giant is in grave danger as a result of habitat loss and poaching.

POACHING

The destruction of the Rainforest through logging seems bad enough when it comes to the reduced habitat for wildlife. But consider poaching, many tons of endangered animals such as the gorillas, monkeys, porcupine and small deer are killed in the rainforest every day in Africa for food. We think that this is an obscene practice but then those of the rich West live only a short distance from a supermarket, so it is hard for the rainforest poacher to empathize with our thoughts on extinct animal life.

Poachers, or forest bush-meat hunters, kill wild endangered animals indiscriminately; they do it to make money, but also to feed many people who would otherwise have no meat at all to eat. It is easy for us just to say that they should not do this but if we care, countries of the West should make other arrangements to feed this population with other meats.

The Sahara Supposition is akin to a New Noah's Ark and goes to the very root of its implications and ambitions.    Today, Rainforests and Oceans are either being destroyed at an inconceivable rate or are being polluted on a scale that in point of fact increases every day. The Sahara Supposition wishes to reclaim relatively an otherwise unused area that will replace only a small part of the Natural World that has been destroyed in the Global Environment in the last 30 years by Humankind. 

It would want to take to this area as many species of foliage as necessary, and replant them, and nurture them in an area that will be free of human destruction.

It would want to take to this area as many species of animal, especially rainforest animals and protect them and make them free of poachers.

The jaguar (Leo Onca), a resident of the Southwestern United States and Central and South America, is closely associated with forests. Its endangered status is the result of hunting and habitat loss. 

This website will shows how current forest practices can help stem the tide of forest annihilation while providing valuable forest products for people. The tropical forests of Puerto Rico, which were abused for many decades, were already badly depleted by the late nineteenth century. Widespread abandonment of deficient over stressed agricultural lands has allowed natural reforestation and planting programs to create a patchwork of private, Commonwealth, and Federal forests across the Sahara Desert.