Rainforest

Earth Explorers

• Dropping into the Gomantong Caves

  TV producer James Brickell finds that hell on Earth is very much alive and crawling with insect life when he abseils into a cave in Borneo.

Earth News

• Can capitalism save the Amazon?

  It would be easy to think that the rainforest was saved, or at least, that the destruction of the Amazon rainforest is no longer one of the great crises facing a planet finally reaching consensus on the issue of global warming.

• Brown's plan to save rainforests

  A new global deal to protect the world's rainforests has been proposed in a report drawn up for Gordon Brown.

What lives here?

Amphibians

• Darwin's frog
• Venezuela pebble toad

Birds

• African fish eagle
• Red kite
• Temminck's tragopan
• Demoiselle crane
• White-fronted bee-eater
• King bird of paradise
• Raggiana bird of paradise
• Six-wired bird of paradise
• Superb bird of paradise
• Vogelkop bowerbird
• Wire-tailed manakin
• Knot
• Marvellous spatuletail

Insects

• Army ant

Mammals

• Brown-throated sloth
• Giant anteater
• Common blossom bat
• Greater bulldog bat
• Little bent-wing bat
• Straw-coloured fruit bat
• Giant river otter
• Jaguar
• Leopard
• Otter
• Puma
• Raccoon
• South American coati
• South American grey fox
• Spectacled bear
• Tiger
• Southern three-banded armadillo
• Tiger quoll
• Malayan colugo
• Hippopotamus
• Doria's Tree-Kangaroo
• Matschie's tree-kangaroo
• Yellow-bellied glider
• Aye-aye
• Bald uakari
• Black-crested gibbon
• Bornean orangutan
• Chimpanzee
• Common woolly monkey
• Eastern Gorilla
• François' langur
• Indri
• Verreaux's sifaka
• Western gorilla
• Western red colobus
• African bush elephant
• Asian elephant
• Forest elephant
• Capybara

Ray-finned fishes

• Tambaqui

Reptiles

• Nile crocodile
• Yacare caiman
• Amethystine python
• Black mamba
• Brown basilisk
• Frilled lizard
• Sand goanna
• Spotted python
• Yellow anaconda
• Giant river turtle
• Gopher tortoise

About Rainforest

Tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests (TSMF), also known as tropical moist forests, are a tropical and subtropical forest biome.

Tropical and subtropical forest regions with lower rainfall are home to tropical and subtropical dry broadleaf forests and tropical and subtropical coniferous forests. Temperate rain forests also occur in certain humid temperate coastal regions.

The biome includes several types of forests:

• Lowland equatorial evergreen rain forests, commonly known as tropical rainforests, are forests which receive high rainfall (more than 2000 mm, or 80 inches, annually) throughout the year. These forests occur in a belt around the equator, with the largest areas in the Amazon basin of South America, the Congo basin of central Africa, Indonesia, and New Guinea.
• Moist deciduous and semi-evergreen seasonal forests, receive high overall rainfall with a warm summer wet season and a cooler winter dry season. Some trees in these forests drop some or all of their leaves during the winter dry season. These forests are found in parts of South America, in Central America and around the Caribbean, in coastal West Africa, parts of the Indian subcontinent, and across much of Indochina.
• Montane rain forests, some of which are known as cloud forests, are found in cooler-climate mountainous areas.
• Flooded forests, including freshwater swamp forests and peat swamp forests.

Tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests are common in several terrestrial ecozones, including parts of the Afrotropic (equatorial Africa), Indomalaya (parts of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia), the Neotropic (northern South America and Central America), Australasia (eastern Indonesia, New Guinea, northern and eastern Australia), and Oceania (the tropical islands of the Pacific Ocean). About half of the world's tropical rainforests are in the South American countries of Brazil and Peru. Rain forests now cover less than 6% of Earth's land surface. Scientists estimate that more than half of all the world's plant and animal species live in tropical rain forests.

Read more at Wikipedia