100 Facts Rainforests – Bitesized Facts & Awesome Images to Support KS2 Learning

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Understory plants often produce flowers that are large and easy to see, such as Heliconia, native to the Americas and the South Pacific. Others have a strong smell, such as orchids. These features attract pollinators even in the understory’s low-light conditions. Due to bountiful Pacific inlets, rivers, and streams, the traditional Tlingit diet consists of a wide variety of aquatic life: crab, shrimp, clams, oysters, seals, and fish such as herring, halibut, and, crucially, salmon. Kelps and other seaweeds can be harvested and eaten in soups or dried. One familiar Tlingit saying is “When the tide is out, our table is set.” Animals such as wild pigs ( Sus scrofa), armadillos, and anteaters forage in the decomposing brush for these tasty insects, roots and tubers of the South American rainforest. Even larger predators, including leopards ( Panthera pardus), skulk in the darkness to surprise their prey. Smaller rodents, such as rats and lowland pacas (a type of striped rodent indigenous to Central and South America), hide from predators beneath the shallow roots of trees that dominate the canopy and emergent layer.

Thousands and thousands of insect species can also be found in the canopy, from bees to beetles, borers to butterflies. Many of these insects are the principal diet of the canopy’s reptiles, including the "flying" draco lizards of Southeast Asia. The temperate rainforest of the northwest coast of North America is the home of the Tlingit. The Tlingit enjoy a diverse diet, relying on both marine and freshwater species, as well as game from inland forests. A tree known as the idiot fruit grows in Australia‘s Daintree rainforest. Veiled stinkhorn, fungi found in tropical rainforests smell like rotting food! The droppings of birds in the tropical rainforest grow into new plants.

APP was in 2007 “disassociated” from the FSC and remains barred from membership due to “destructive forestry practices”; its control of Paper Excellence should lead to the same outcome for the Canadian company, activists say. Tropical rainforests have long been home to tribal peoples who rely on their surroundings for food, shelter, and medicines. Today very few forest people live in traditional ways; most have been displaced by outside settlers, have been forced to give up their lifestyles by governments, or have chosen to adopt outside customs.

Fact 6:Rainforests help to regulate the temperatures around the world and the weather patterns as well. They also cool and regulate local micro-climates limiting the Earth’s reflectivity that stabilizes ocean currents, wind, and rainfall patterns. Many individuals, communities, governments, intergovernmental organizations, and conservation groups are taking innovative approaches to protect threatened rainforest habitats.There are over 3000 km of roots in one hectare of forest which form a complex mesh that makes soil more stable