TROPICAL RAINFORESTS: The Understory
 Home
 What's New
 About
 Rainforests
   Mission
   Introduction
   Characteristics
   Biodiversity
   The Canopy
   Forest Floor
   Forest Waters
   Indigenous People
   Deforestation
   Consequences
   Saving Rainforests
   Amazon rainforest
   Borneo rainforest
   Congo rainforest
   Country Profiles
   Statistics
   Works Cited
   For Kids
   For Teachers
   Photos/Images
   Expert Interviews
   Rainforest News
  Forest data
   Global deforestation
   Tropical deforestation
   By country
   Deforestation charts
   Regional forest data
   Deforestation drivers
 XML Feeds
 Other Languages
   Chinese
   French
   German
   Japanese
   Portuguese
   Spanish
 Pictures
 Books
 Links
 Newsletter
 Education
 Mongabay Sites
   Kids' site
   Travel Tips
   Tropical Fish
   Madagascar
 Contact



About this site
Providing tropical forest news, statistics, photos, and information, rainforests.mongabay.com is the world's most popular rainforest site. [more]



Weekly Newsletter
Enter your email:
Mongabay will never distribute your email address or send spam.





Share

Primary rainforest in Brazil. (Photo by R. Butler)



THE FOREST FLOOR

The forest floor of primary tropical rainforest is rarely the thick, tangled jungle of movies and adventure stories. It is actually quite the opposite: the floor is relatively clear of vegetation due to the deep darkness created by perhaps 100 feet (30 m) of canopy vegetation above. The canopy not only blocks out sunlight, but damps wind and rain. A visitor to the rainforest during a rainstorm will usually not immediately feel falling rain because so much is deflected and collected by various canopy plants. The blocking of wind by the canopy makes the forest floor a calm place where only the slightest breeze blows during tropical thunderstorms. When hiking in primary tropical rainforest a flashlight may be more useful than a machete since the subdued lighting limits ground growth. Instead of choking vegetation, a visitor will find large tree trunks, interspersed hanging vines and lianas, and countless seedlings and saplings and a relatively small number of ground plants.

The term "jungle" is frequently applied to forest areas having dense ground growth. Such "jungle" is characteristic of disturbed forest, usually near the forest edges, in recently opened light gaps, river banks, and areas where the forest is reclaiming previously cleared land. Vigorous ground growth is only possible where plenty of light is available—where there is a break or thinning in the light-absorbing canopy which screens out all but the 0.5-5 percent of light that reaches the floor in the primary forest.

CHARACTERISTICS

Despite its constant shade, the ground floor of the rainforest is the site for important interactions and complex relationships. The forest floor is one of the principal sites of decomposition, a process paramount for the continuance of the forest as a whole. It is also home to thousands of plants and animals, and provides support for trees responsible for the formation of the canopy. The ground level is the region of the forest which was first explored and has been the most intensively studied.


Review questions:
  • What is the difference between jungle and rainforest?
  • Why is there generally little light on the forest floor?

[print version | spanish | french | portuguese | chinese | japanese]


Continued: Soils and Nutrient Cycling


This article was written by Rhett A. Butler [bibliographic citation for this page] and was last updated on the most recent date listed in the column on the right side.




Other pages in this section:
Forest Floor Intro
Seeds & Fruit
Mammals (Herbivores)
Birds
Invertebrates
- - - - -
References
Soils & Nutrient Cylcing
Forest Succession
Mammals (Carnivores & Omnivores)
Reptiles & Amphibians

- - - - -
Kids version of this section
The forest floor


Recent news

Important safeguards to protect rainforests lacking in REDD negotiating text
(11/06/2009) Important safeguards to protect natural forests are still lacking in negotiating text on REDD, a proposed mechanism for mitigating climate change by paying developing countries to keep trees standing, reports an alliance of activist groups.


World's first video of the elusive and endangered bay cat
(11/05/2009) Rare, elusive, and endangered by habitat loss, the bay cat is one of the world's least studied wild cats. Several specimens of the cat were collected in the 19th and 20th Century, but a living cat wasn't even photographed until 1998. Now, researchers in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, have managed to capture the first film of the bay cat (Catopuma badia). Lasting seven seconds, the video shows the distinctly reddish-brown cat in its habitat.


Photos: Palm oil threatens Borneo's rarest cats
(11/04/2009) Oil palm expansion is threatening Borneo's rarest wild cats, reports a new study based on three years of fieldwork and more than 17,000 camera trap nights. Studying cats in five locations—each with different environments—in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, researchers found that four of five cat species are threatened by habitat loss due to palm oil plantations. "No other place has a higher percentage of threatened wild cats!" Jim Sanderson, an expert on the world's small cats, told Mongabay.com. Pointing out that 80 percent of Borneo's cats face extinction, Sanderson said that "not one of these wild cats poses a direct threat to humans."


Conservation and Carbon in Borneo’s Heart and Ours
(11/04/2009) My friend Rezal Kusumaatmadja contacted me in July to ask if I could join him and some of his associates for a couple of days in the village Mendawai, located along the Katingan River in south central Kalimantan. The purpose of the gathering was to bring everyone in the group up to date on progress and challenges related to the Katingan Peat Conservation Project, as well as to give the group an opportunity to meet one another. The Katingan Project aims to create a forest-based carbon containment facility defined and guided by REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Destruction in the developing world) principles and methodology. Currently, nearly 25% of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions are caused by felling, burning and converting the world’s remaining primary forests. While areas surrounding the Katingan peat forest vividly express this statistic, Katingan is part of a growing strategy to reverse the trend. The Katingan project endeavors to transform conservation into a product that might offer strong competition against illegal logging and expansion of industrial agricultural plantations - whose practices cause enormous emissions of greenhouse gasses, as well as destroying biodiversity, depleting and polluting watersheds and corroding native cultures.


Non-Malaysian and Indonesian palm oil producers pledge not to develop peatlands for plantations
(11/04/2009) Palm oil producers outside of Malaysia and Indonesia pledged to stop developing new plantations on peatlands, circumventing an impasse that developed between palm oil producers and environmental groups meeting this week at the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil in Kuala Lumpur. The factions deadlocked over plans to account for emissions from plantation development, delaying the criteria for a year.





More rainforest news
what's new | rainforests home | for kids | help | madagascar | search | about | languages | contact



Copyright Rhett Butler 1994-2009

"Rainforest" is used interchangeably with "rain forest" on this site. "Jungle" is generally not used.