Forests - Types Of Forests, Forest Process, Forests As Habitat, Forests As A Natural Resource
ecological regional angiosperm climate
A forest is any ecological community that is structurally dominated by tree-sized woody plants. Forests occur anywhere that the climate is suitable in terms of length of the growing season, air and soil temperature, and sufficiency of soil moisture. Forests can be classified into broad types on the basis of their geographic range and dominant types of trees. The most extensive of these types are boreal coniferous, temperate angiosperm, and tropical angiosperm forests. However, there are regional and local variants of all of these kinds of forests. Old-growth tropical rainforests support an enormous diversity of species under relatively benign climatic conditions, and this ecosystem is considered to represent the acme of Earth's ecological development. Within the constraints of their regional climate, temperate and boreal forests also represent peaks of ecological development.
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Many countries have developed national schemes for an ecological classification of their forests. Typically, these schemes are based on biophysical information and reflect the natural, large-scale patterns of species composition, soil type, topography, and climate. However, these classifications may vary greatly among countries, even for similar forest types. An international system of ecosystem c…
Although tropical rain forests have relatively high rates of net primary productivity, their net ecosystem productivity is very small or zero. This occurs because these forests are typically in an old-growth condition, so that there are always some individual trees that are dying or recently dead, resulting in a relatively large number of standing dead trees and logs lying on the forest floor. The…
Although trees are the largest, most productive organisms in forests, the forest ecosystem is much more than a population of trees growing on the land. Forests also provide habitat for a host of other species of plants, along with numerous animals and microorganisms. Most of these associated species cannot live anywhere else; they have an absolute requirement of forested habitat. Often that need i…
The global area of forest of all kinds was about 8.4 billion acres (3.4 billion hectares) in 1990, of which 4.3 billion acres (1.76 billion ha) was tropical forest and the rest temperate and boreal forest. That global forest area is at least one-third smaller than it was prior to extensive deforestation caused by human activities. Most of the deforested land has been converted to permanent agricul…
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