the.com/tropical rainforest
Earth's crowded rich neighborhood, where everything's fighting sunlight for rent
means A dense, warm, high-rainfall forest near the equator that holds an extraordinary concentration of plant and animal species, packed into tight vertical layers from forest floor to canopy.
from 'Tropical' traces back to Greek 'tropikos,' meaning 'of a turn,' from 'tropos' (turn) — because the sun appears to turn back toward the equator at the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, the latitudes that bound this climate zone. 'Rainforest' is a more modern, descriptive compound, likely translating German 'Regenwald,' coined in the 1800s by botanists cataloguing forests defined by their relentless, near-daily rainfall rather than by any single dominant tree.
- soil quality
- actually nutrient-poor, nutrients live in the plants
- canopy traffic
- most species never touch the ground
- rain source
- trees make their own rain by transpiring
- species density
- one hectare can beat all of North America's tree species