Tropical Rainforest Floor Plants
As such plants growing here have special adaptations that allow them to grow and thrive in the tropical rainforest.
Tropical rainforest floor plants. There is so little sunlight on the rainforest floor that very few plants grow there but there are animals that love the decaying plant matter that can be found. Tropical rainforest plants with a shallow rooted tree are often equipped with buttress roots. Buttress roots a giant tree with buttress roots in the costa rican rainforest. The forest floor is the rainforest s bottom most layer which receives only 2 of the sunlight.
Thus plants growing here are adapted to the low light conditions and the forest floor is relatively clear of vegetation. A rainforest is defined by merriam webster as a tropical woodland with an annual rainfall of at least 100 inches 254 centimeters and marked by lofty broad leaved evergreen trees. Tropical rainforests contain four layers of vegetation. Thus relatively larger animals of the tropical rainforest like the okapi the tapir the sumatran rhinoceros.
Thus the rainforest plants do not need conservation of moisture. There are many types of plants that are only found in rainforests in tropical regions of the world. The canopy layer is the main layer forming an umbrella over the lower two layers. The tropical rainforest has dense vegetation often forming three different layers the canopy the understory and the ground layer.
Plants although tropical rainforests receive 12 hours of sunlight daily less than 2 of that sunlight ever reaches the ground. Below the canopy is the understory where sunshine hardly penetrates and most plants never grow taller than. On the forest floor the lack of light means that it is difficult for many species of plants to survive. These specializations have been mentioned below.
It is actually rather the opposite. Based on the plant growth habit there are four strata in the tropical rainforest biome. It lies beneath the emergent canopy and understory layers which is the reason why almost no sunlight reaches this area. The amazon rainforest alone provides a habitat for over 40 000 plant species.
Starting from the top the first is called emergent layer second is canopy layer third is understory layer and the last is forest floor. The forest floor of primary tropical rainforest is rarely the thick tangled jungle of movies and adventure stories. Tropical rainforest plants information. The hot humid climate of the world s tropical regions provide ideal conditions for plant life.
The floor is relatively clear of vegetation due to the deep darkness created by perhaps 100 feet 30 m of canopy vegetation above. Tropical rainforests such as the amazon are found near the equator in central and south america africa southeast asia and australia. The tropical rainforest floor layer or forest floor is the ground layer of this biome.