RESEARCH STARTER

Rainforest biomes

Rain-forest biomes are complex tropical ecosystems characterized by extraordinarily high biodiversity, housing at least 50% of the world's known plant and animal species despite covering only 6% of the Earth's surface. These biomes, particularly those in the Amazon basin, are vital for ecological balance, acting as crucial water, nutrient, and carbon dioxide regulators. However, they are under severe threat, experiencing unprecedented destruction primarily due to human activity, which could lead to their vanishing by the mid-21st century. This loss has dire implications, including reduced biodiversity and altered local climates, resulting in increased droughts and floods.

The rain forests are also invaluable for agricultural and medical advancements, offering genetic resources that are essential for developing resilient crop varieties and discovering new medicines. Many edible fruits and staple crops originate from these regions, highlighting their potential for enhancing food security. Furthermore, a significant portion of modern pharmaceuticals is derived from plant compounds found in tropical forests, underscoring the importance of preserving these ecosystems for future medicinal discoveries.

Despite their ecological and economic significance, ongoing deforestation driven by activities such as oil production and subsistence farming poses critical challenges. This situation calls for urgent action and awareness to protect these irreplaceable biomes and their rich biodiversity, which are essential not only for the environment but also for human health and well-being.

Full Article

  • Categories: Biomes; ecosystems; forests and forestry

Rainforests are complicated tropical ecosystems with extremely high levels of biodiversity. Occupying only 6 percent of the Earth’s surface, they contain at least 50 percent of the world’s known plant and animal species. The rainforests are being destroyed at such an unprecedented rate, however, that if the trend persists, tropical rainforests will face severe long-term degradation by the middle of the twenty-first century.

Tropical rainforests are the most complex ecosystems on Earth, consisting of interacting systems of vegetation and animal species, all interdependent and coexisting in a concentrated cacophony of life. Because species found in one area may differ radically from those in another region only miles away, rainforests are individualistic and highly diversified.

The rainforests surrounding the Amazon basin in South America represent the last great contiguous expanse of tropical rainforest remaining in the world. Containing an extraordinary share of the world’s higher plant species and a significant share of the world’s bird species, Amazonia is being systematically devastated by human actions. About 17 percent of the Amazon forest has been lost over the past fifty years, and additional forest has been degraded. Research indicates that ongoing deforestation and climate change could push parts of Amazonia toward a tipping point, with some areas shifting toward drier ecosystems. In the mid-1990s, about 14,000 acres were being cleared every day.

The environmental, economic, and social consequences of large-scale tropical deforestation are numerous and severe for the entire Earth. The implications of losing the rainforests’ biodiversity are dire. Moreover, rainforests act as giant solar-powered engines that pump water, nutrients, and carbon dioxide through the biosphere. Studies of Amazonia show that some parts, especially in the southeast, are estimated to release more carbon than they absorb. Water captured by vegetation is returned to the atmosphere by evaporation and then to the forest as rain. The forest also stores large quantities of water in the vines and roots of the plants, water that is slowly released to streams and rivers. When large tracts of rainforest are cleared, the system’s ability to store water decreases, disrupting the local climate and causing alternating periods of drought and floods.

Rainforests consist of lush, abundant growth, but the soil is deficient in nutrients and only marginally fertile. Although organic materials decompose rapidly in warm, humid climates, heavy rains leach nutrients from the soil. Plant life has adapted by rapidly ingesting nutrients as they become available; thus, most nutrients are stored in the vegetation itself, not in the soil. When the land is cleared for agriculture or livestock grazing, the necessary crop-sustaining nutrients are depleted within a few growing seasons. Rainforest destruction also adversely impacts the environment and human life by reducing the removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the production of oxygen through photosynthesis.

Food Resources

Tropical rainforests are important sources of genetic material for improving crop plants or breeding new varieties. As the population size of a species shrinks, genetic diversity shrinks in direct proportion because as a species diminishes in number, genes disappear even if the species survives. A reduction of the gene pool renders a species less adaptable to changing environments and more susceptible to extinction. Future generations will be unable to benefit from currently unidentified but potentially useful properties of these species if their genetic diversity is extinguished.

Without periodic infusions of new germplasm, crops bred specifically for humans, such as coffee, bananas, and cocoa, cannot continue to produce high yields at low cost. As the products of generations of selective breeding, these crops continually require the amalgamation of new genetic material to maintain productivity and flavor, to counteract new diseases and insect strains, and to endure environmental stresses such as unusual cold or drought.

A number of important crops, including cocoa, coffee, bananas, and sugarcane, have been saved from viruses and other pathogens by being cross-bred with wild species having naturally acquired resistance. Although crop diseases can be contained or eliminated by applying pesticides, the cost is more than many farmers can afford. It is much less expensive and more environmentally benign to find a resistant strain of the same species in the wild.

Future contributions from wild germplasm, in addition to breeding new disease-resistant varieties of crops, might include the creation of hybrid perennial varieties of annual crops, eliminating the need for yearly plowing and sowing. Another possibility may be new varieties of conventional crops that could survive in conditions or environments that are unsuitable, extending the plants’ cultivation range.

Rainforests also provide opportunities for humans to develop and cultivate entirely new crops. Many staples, such as rice, peanuts, yams, and pineapples, originated in ancient tropical forests. These staples are not necessarily the best possible sources of nutrition and protein; they were merely the crops most easily cultivated by Neolithic humans.

While temperate forests produce fewer than two dozen edible fruits, more than twenty-five hundred palatable fruits grow in the tropics. Only about 10 percent of these are typically consumed, and only about one dozen are exported. The variety of fruits that Americans purchase from grocery stores is but a small fraction of those potentially available.

Because Americans consume an enormous quantity of sugar annually, there is a need for a sweetening agent lacking the potentially undesirable side effects of synthetic sweeteners. Natural sweeteners found in common fruits are problematic because Americans already consume more of these than is healthy. However, a new class of nonfattening natural sweeteners made of protein compounds has been identified. At least one thousand times sweeter than sucrose and with no known detrimental side effects, these tropical sweeteners may prove a viable replacement for the sucrose commonly added to food items ranging from salad dressing to fish products.

Medicinal Plants

Rainforest plants contain a plethora of yet uninvestigated bioactive compounds with undiscovered potential for use in modern medicine. Future generations may benefit from these substances only if the species containing them are preserved and studied. Although the medicinal properties of plants have been known for at least thirty-five thousand years, science has reduced human dependence on medicinal plants. Nevertheless, many US prescription drugs contain substances of natural origin, and at least half of these contain active ingredients derived from plants.

Medicinal plants from the tropics aid modern pharmacologists in four ways. Plants may be used as a direct source of therapeutic drugs that cannot effectively be synthesized in the laboratory. Plant extracts may become the starting point for more complex compounds. Derived substances can serve as “blueprints” for new synthetic compounds. Finally, plants may assist as taxonomic markers for uncovering new healing compounds. Of the hundreds of thousands of plant species inhabiting the rainforests, only a small fraction have been identified and studied, and the potentially beneficial pharmacological properties of many of these are yet to be ascertained.

Endangered Biome

Although extinction is a natural process, tropical rainforests are disappearing at a rate four hundred times faster than during the geological past. One major cause of rainforest destruction in Amazonia is agricultural expansion, especially cattle ranching, although oil production and transportation can also damage rainforest areas. The fragile rainforest environment is easily contaminated by leaks, spills, and the ejection of effluents during pumping operations. Of even greater environmental impact is the oil companies’ practice of building roads from inhabited areas to the well sites. Pipelines are built along the roads to carry the oil out of the jungle, but unemployed urban residents often follow the roads into the jungle and become squatters on adjoining land. They clear a small section of rainforest, using the slash-and-burn method, to eke out a living as subsistence farmers.

Unfortunately, when the rainforest is gone, so are most of the nutrients needed for local agriculture; the land cannot sustain crops for long. Then the farmers and their families must move on and claim more of the forest, regardless of the effects on the jungle or its native species. The tens of thousands of squatters engaging in this practice contribute to the rapid rate of rainforest destruction.

Although aware of the problem, the governments of most South American oil-exporting countries have a strong incentive to underplay or ignore the negative impact of oil production in their rainforests: Their economies depend on oil, which is one of South America’s largest exports. Ultimately, the demand for oil, driven by high consumption rates in the industrialized nations of the Northern Hemisphere, particularly the United States, is one of the primary factors causing rainforest destruction.


Bibliography

“Amazon Threats.” World Wildlife Fund (WWF), wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/amazon/amazon_threats. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.

Branford, Susan, and Oriel Glock. The Last Frontier: Fighting Over Land in the Amazon. Biblio Distribution Center, 1985.

“Deforestation in the Amazon is Accelerating the Point of No Return.” World Wildlife Fund (WWF), 8 Nov. 2022, wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?6794391/Deforestation-in-the-Amazon-is-accelerating-the-point-of-no-return-warns-WWF. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.

Farnsworth, N. “Screening Plants for New Medicines.” Biodiversity, edited by E. O. Wilson, National Academy Press, 1988.

Gatti, Luciana V., et al. “Amazonia as a Carbon Source Linked to Deforestation and Climate Change.” Nature, vol. 595, 2021, pp. 388–93, doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03629-6. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.

Myers, Norman. A Wealth of Wild Species: Storehouse for Human Life. Westview Press, 1983.

Place, Susan, editor. Tropical Rainforests: Latin American Nature and Society in Transition. Rev. ed., Scholarly Resources, 2001.

Smith, Jeremy M. B. “Tropical Rainforest.” Britannica, 1 Mar. 2026, www.britannica.com/science/tropical-rainforest. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.

Thaler, Gregory. Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World: Conservation and Displacement in the Global Tropics. Yale UP, 2024.

“Tropical Rainforests.” World Wildlife Fund (WWF), wwf.panda.org/discover/our_focus/forests_practice/importance_forests/tropical_rainforest/. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.

Full Article

  • Categories: Biomes; ecosystems; forests and forestry

Rainforests are complicated tropical ecosystems with extremely high levels of biodiversity. Occupying only 6 percent of the Earth’s surface, they contain at least 50 percent of the world’s known plant and animal species. The rainforests are being destroyed at such an unprecedented rate, however, that if the trend persists, tropical rainforests will face severe long-term degradation by the middle of the twenty-first century.

Tropical rainforests are the most complex ecosystems on Earth, consisting of interacting systems of vegetation and animal species, all interdependent and coexisting in a concentrated cacophony of life. Because species found in one area may differ radically from those in another region only miles away, rainforests are individualistic and highly diversified.

The rainforests surrounding the Amazon basin in South America represent the last great contiguous expanse of tropical rainforest remaining in the world. Containing an extraordinary share of the world’s higher plant species and a significant share of the world’s bird species, Amazonia is being systematically devastated by human actions. About 17 percent of the Amazon forest has been lost over the past fifty years, and additional forest has been degraded. Research indicates that ongoing deforestation and climate change could push parts of Amazonia toward a tipping point, with some areas shifting toward drier ecosystems. In the mid-1990s, about 14,000 acres were being cleared every day.

The environmental, economic, and social consequences of large-scale tropical deforestation are numerous and severe for the entire Earth. The implications of losing the rainforests’ biodiversity are dire. Moreover, rainforests act as giant solar-powered engines that pump water, nutrients, and carbon dioxide through the biosphere. Studies of Amazonia show that some parts, especially in the southeast, are estimated to release more carbon than they absorb. Water captured by vegetation is returned to the atmosphere by evaporation and then to the forest as rain. The forest also stores large quantities of water in the vines and roots of the plants, water that is slowly released to streams and rivers. When large tracts of rainforest are cleared, the system’s ability to store water decreases, disrupting the local climate and causing alternating periods of drought and floods.

Rainforests consist of lush, abundant growth, but the soil is deficient in nutrients and only marginally fertile. Although organic materials decompose rapidly in warm, humid climates, heavy rains leach nutrients from the soil. Plant life has adapted by rapidly ingesting nutrients as they become available; thus, most nutrients are stored in the vegetation itself, not in the soil. When the land is cleared for agriculture or livestock grazing, the necessary crop-sustaining nutrients are depleted within a few growing seasons. Rainforest destruction also adversely impacts the environment and human life by reducing the removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the production of oxygen through photosynthesis.

Food Resources

Tropical rainforests are important sources of genetic material for improving crop plants or breeding new varieties. As the population size of a species shrinks, genetic diversity shrinks in direct proportion because as a species diminishes in number, genes disappear even if the species survives. A reduction of the gene pool renders a species less adaptable to changing environments and more susceptible to extinction. Future generations will be unable to benefit from currently unidentified but potentially useful properties of these species if their genetic diversity is extinguished.

Without periodic infusions of new germplasm, crops bred specifically for humans, such as coffee, bananas, and cocoa, cannot continue to produce high yields at low cost. As the products of generations of selective breeding, these crops continually require the amalgamation of new genetic material to maintain productivity and flavor, to counteract new diseases and insect strains, and to endure environmental stresses such as unusual cold or drought.

A number of important crops, including cocoa, coffee, bananas, and sugarcane, have been saved from viruses and other pathogens by being cross-bred with wild species having naturally acquired resistance. Although crop diseases can be contained or eliminated by applying pesticides, the cost is more than many farmers can afford. It is much less expensive and more environmentally benign to find a resistant strain of the same species in the wild.

Future contributions from wild germplasm, in addition to breeding new disease-resistant varieties of crops, might include the creation of hybrid perennial varieties of annual crops, eliminating the need for yearly plowing and sowing. Another possibility may be new varieties of conventional crops that could survive in conditions or environments that are unsuitable, extending the plants’ cultivation range.

Rainforests also provide opportunities for humans to develop and cultivate entirely new crops. Many staples, such as rice, peanuts, yams, and pineapples, originated in ancient tropical forests. These staples are not necessarily the best possible sources of nutrition and protein; they were merely the crops most easily cultivated by Neolithic humans.

While temperate forests produce fewer than two dozen edible fruits, more than twenty-five hundred palatable fruits grow in the tropics. Only about 10 percent of these are typically consumed, and only about one dozen are exported. The variety of fruits that Americans purchase from grocery stores is but a small fraction of those potentially available.

Because Americans consume an enormous quantity of sugar annually, there is a need for a sweetening agent lacking the potentially undesirable side effects of synthetic sweeteners. Natural sweeteners found in common fruits are problematic because Americans already consume more of these than is healthy. However, a new class of nonfattening natural sweeteners made of protein compounds has been identified. At least one thousand times sweeter than sucrose and with no known detrimental side effects, these tropical sweeteners may prove a viable replacement for the sucrose commonly added to food items ranging from salad dressing to fish products.

Medicinal Plants

Rainforest plants contain a plethora of yet uninvestigated bioactive compounds with undiscovered potential for use in modern medicine. Future generations may benefit from these substances only if the species containing them are preserved and studied. Although the medicinal properties of plants have been known for at least thirty-five thousand years, science has reduced human dependence on medicinal plants. Nevertheless, many US prescription drugs contain substances of natural origin, and at least half of these contain active ingredients derived from plants.

Medicinal plants from the tropics aid modern pharmacologists in four ways. Plants may be used as a direct source of therapeutic drugs that cannot effectively be synthesized in the laboratory. Plant extracts may become the starting point for more complex compounds. Derived substances can serve as “blueprints” for new synthetic compounds. Finally, plants may assist as taxonomic markers for uncovering new healing compounds. Of the hundreds of thousands of plant species inhabiting the rainforests, only a small fraction have been identified and studied, and the potentially beneficial pharmacological properties of many of these are yet to be ascertained.

Endangered Biome

Although extinction is a natural process, tropical rainforests are disappearing at a rate four hundred times faster than during the geological past. One major cause of rainforest destruction in Amazonia is agricultural expansion, especially cattle ranching, although oil production and transportation can also damage rainforest areas. The fragile rainforest environment is easily contaminated by leaks, spills, and the ejection of effluents during pumping operations. Of even greater environmental impact is the oil companies’ practice of building roads from inhabited areas to the well sites. Pipelines are built along the roads to carry the oil out of the jungle, but unemployed urban residents often follow the roads into the jungle and become squatters on adjoining land. They clear a small section of rainforest, using the slash-and-burn method, to eke out a living as subsistence farmers.

Unfortunately, when the rainforest is gone, so are most of the nutrients needed for local agriculture; the land cannot sustain crops for long. Then the farmers and their families must move on and claim more of the forest, regardless of the effects on the jungle or its native species. The tens of thousands of squatters engaging in this practice contribute to the rapid rate of rainforest destruction.

Although aware of the problem, the governments of most South American oil-exporting countries have a strong incentive to underplay or ignore the negative impact of oil production in their rainforests: Their economies depend on oil, which is one of South America’s largest exports. Ultimately, the demand for oil, driven by high consumption rates in the industrialized nations of the Northern Hemisphere, particularly the United States, is one of the primary factors causing rainforest destruction.


Bibliography

“Amazon Threats.” World Wildlife Fund (WWF), wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/amazon/amazon_threats. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.

Branford, Susan, and Oriel Glock. The Last Frontier: Fighting Over Land in the Amazon. Biblio Distribution Center, 1985.

“Deforestation in the Amazon is Accelerating the Point of No Return.” World Wildlife Fund (WWF), 8 Nov. 2022, wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?6794391/Deforestation-in-the-Amazon-is-accelerating-the-point-of-no-return-warns-WWF. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.

Farnsworth, N. “Screening Plants for New Medicines.” Biodiversity, edited by E. O. Wilson, National Academy Press, 1988.

Gatti, Luciana V., et al. “Amazonia as a Carbon Source Linked to Deforestation and Climate Change.” Nature, vol. 595, 2021, pp. 388–93, doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03629-6. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.

Myers, Norman. A Wealth of Wild Species: Storehouse for Human Life. Westview Press, 1983.

Place, Susan, editor. Tropical Rainforests: Latin American Nature and Society in Transition. Rev. ed., Scholarly Resources, 2001.

Smith, Jeremy M. B. “Tropical Rainforest.” Britannica, 1 Mar. 2026, www.britannica.com/science/tropical-rainforest. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.

Thaler, Gregory. Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World: Conservation and Displacement in the Global Tropics. Yale UP, 2024.

“Tropical Rainforests.” World Wildlife Fund (WWF), wwf.panda.org/discover/our_focus/forests_practice/importance_forests/tropical_rainforest/. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.

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