4 Different Types of Forests
Forests are more than just magical places that provide the setting for fiction novels and spooky stories, and they cover more than a third of the earth’s surface. With more than three trillion trees making up the world’s forests, myriad living creatures call the forests home. Much more than that, though, is the fact that forests serve many vital purposes.
It’s easy to get confused by the different forest types globally, though, because they occur in so many different regions.
Forests can be broken down into tropical, temperate, and boreal types, with various sub-types according to climate, geographic location, seasonality, and leafing. Tropical forests have warm temperatures all year, while temperate forests experience four seasons with high and low temperatures. Boreal forests exist in predominantly icy regions.
Forests are defined in many different ways, and there are specific characteristics that can be used to differentiate between the types of forests. Let’s look at the broader categories that forests fall into and what sets them apart.
Table of Contents
The Forest Biome
The term ‘forest’ has been used broadly to mean an area with a large number of trees, but it’s important to remember that a forest is not just a dense area of foliage. The word ‘biome’ is more accurate to describe forests because this takes into account that a forest is a naturally occurring community of fauna and flora – a functioning system of interconnected plants and animals that rely on each other for survival.
Characteristics For Classification
While there are many colloquial terms for forests, there are ways to differentiate between forest types by looking at their geographic location, climate, and what foliage grows there. As we will see, these factors all interlink. Here is a deeper explanation of how … Read the rest of the story.
