HKDSE Geography/M6/Tropical Rainforests

The Tropical Rainforest Biome

Tropical rainforests are a biome. A biome is an area that has similar climatic characteristics and thus gives rise to similar vegetation.

However, a place located in the tropical rainforest biome does not necessarily have tropical rainforests. This is because the area may not have been matured enough, or may have been damaged by natural disasters or human activities.

Biomes are as follows:

In this section, we will study the tropical rainforest as a biome, and look at the general characteristics of tropical rainforest. In the next section we shall study it as an ecosystem.

Distrubution

Tropical rainforests are distributed in three major areas:

• East Africa. Most of the tropical rainforests are found at the Congo Basin.
• South America. Most of the tropical rainforests are found at the Amazon Basin.
• Southeast Asia.

The rest are scattered around the globe.

This diagram shows tropical rainforests in dark green (areas in light green are temperate forests):

Note how the regions here are smaller than the tropical rainforest biome regions we saw above.