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Wet tropical forests in North America span from sea level to an altitude of 1,000 metres (3,300 ft). They have particular geologic, topographic, and soil conditions that characterize them. These characteristics influence biotic structures and relationships and have contributed to the high biodiversity of the ecoregion.
The North American inland rainforest is located in the so-called interior wet-belt, approximately 500-700 km inland from the Pacific coast on western, windward mountain slopes and valley bottoms of the Columbia Mountains and the Rocky Mountains.
These forests are found predominantly in North and Central America and experience low levels of precipitation and moderate variability in temperature. Tropical and subtropical coniferous forests are characterized by diverse species of conifers , whose needles are adapted to deal with the variable climatic conditions. [ 1 ]
A portion of the temperate rain forest region of North America, the largest area of temperate zone rainforests on the planet, is the Pacific temperate rain forests ecoregion, which occur on west-facing coastal mountains along the Pacific coast of North America, from Kodiak Island in Alaska to northern California, and are part of the Nearctic realm.
The first tropical rainforests appeared during the Devonian, characterized mainly by Pseudosporochnalean and Archaeopteridalean plants. [7] Other canopy forests expanded north-south of the equator during the Paleogene epoch, around 40 million years ago, as a result of the emergence of drier, cooler climates.
In order to be defined as a rainforest, the forest must average at least 140 cm (55 in) of precipitation annually and a temperate rainforest as opposed to a tropical rainforest is defined by a mean annual temperature between 4 and 12 degrees Celsius (39 and 54 degrees Fahrenheit).
Ecoregions of North America, featuring the 50 United States, the District of Columbia and the five inhabited territories. The following is a list of United States ecoregions as identified by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
The Neotropic includes more tropical rainforest (tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests) than any other realm, extending from southern Mexico through Central America and northern South America to southern Brazil, including the vast Amazon rainforest. These rainforest ecoregions are one of the most important reserves of biodiversity on ...