Forest

FOREST

A forest is a large uncultivated land area densely covered with various types of trees, shrubs and herbs. It also has many types of tall grasses, canes, creepers and climbers. You can find trees of sal, teak, sheesham, neem, peepal, banyan, fig, palash, kachnar, amla, bamboo, etc. in a forest.

At some places in a forest, the trees are so thick that sunlight barely reaches the forest floor.

Forest also provides home for different animals, birds, reptiles, insects, worms and microbes. Some live on the floor, others on tree twigs. Some walk on the ground, some burrow and others fly.

Regions in a forest

The trees in the forest have crowns of leaves and branches. The crowns are of different types, sizes and create several horizontal layers in the forest. These layers are divided into the different types.








Canopy

The forest canopy is the uppermost layer of a forest, characterized by the crowns of the trees and a handful of emergent specimens with heights that shoot above the canopy. The canopyis critical to a forest's well-being, and it provides habitat to a wide range of plants and animals. In fact, the canopy is so unique that some organisms spend their entire lives there, never venturing down to the ground. Only certain trees reach the height of the canopy. These trees often have suppressed growth as seedlings while they wait in the understory. When a canopy tree falls, a seedling shoots up to take its place, growing rapidly so that it can reach the light. Once the tree reaches the height of the canopy, it tops out, adding girth but not much height. Eventually, it will die or be damaged in a storm, falling to the ground and contributing to the thick layer of decaying organic material on the forest floor while another seedling takes its place.



Forest floor

The forest floor is often dark and humid due to constant shade from the canopy’s leaves. Despite its constant shade, the forest floor is an important part of the forest ecosystem. 

The forest floor is where decomposition takes place. Decomposition is the process by which fungi and microorganisms break down dead plants and animals and recycle essential materials and nutrients. Also, many of the largest forest animals are found on the forest floor. Some of these are elephants (in Asia), the tapir (Southeast Asia and Central and South America), tigers (Asia), and the jaguar (Central and South America).

Forest animals and their habitats

Forests provide habitat for a large variety of wild animals. Boars, bisons, jackals, elephants live in deeper areas of the forest, where forest is thicker and undisturbed. They lives on the ground.

The Importance of Forests

The chief economic product of forests is timber, but the economic benefits, in terms of climate control, pollution abatement, and wildlife maintenance, have rarely been calculated. The economic importance of nontimber forest products is also increasing. The forest is also vital as a watershed. Because of the thick humus layer, loose soil, and soil-retaining powers of the trees' long roots, forests are vitally important for preserving adequate water supplies. Almost all water ultimately feeds from forest rivers and lakes and from forest-derived water tables. In addition, the forest provides shelter for wildlife, recreation and aesthetic renewal for people, and irreplaceable supplies of oxygen and soil nutrients. Deforestation, particularly in the tropical rain forests, has become a major environmental concern, as it can destabilize the earth's tempeature, humidity, and carbon dioxide levels.



Deforestation

Deforestation is clearing Earth's forests on a massive scale, often resulting in damage to the quality of the land. Forests still cover about 30 percent of the world’s land area, but swaths the size of Panama are lost each and every year.

The world’s rain forests could completely vanish in a hundred years at the current rate of deforestation.
Forests are cut down for many reasons, but most of them are related to money or to people’s need to provide for their families. The biggest driver of deforestation is agriculture. Farmers cut forests to provide more room for planting crops or grazing livestock. Often many small farmers will each clear a few acres to feed their families by cutting down trees and burning them in a process known as “slash and burn” agriculture.

Logging operations, which provide the world’s wood and paper products, also cut countless trees each year. Loggers, some of them acting illegally, also build roads to access more and more remote forests—which leads to further deforestation. Forests are also cut as a result of growing urban sprawl.

Not all deforestation is intentional. Some is caused by a combination of human and natural factors like wildfires and subsequent overgrazing, which may prevent the growth of young trees.

Deforestation has many negative effects on the environment. The most dramatic impact is a loss of habitat for millions of species. Seventy percent of Earth’s land animals and plants live in forests, and many cannot survive the deforestation that destroys their homes.

Deforestation also drives climate change. Forest soils are moist, but without protection from sun-blocking tree cover they quickly dry out. Trees also help perpetuate the water cycle by returning water vapor back into the atmosphere. Without trees to fill these roles, many former forest lands can quickly become barren deserts.

Removing trees deprives the forest of portions of its canopy, which blocks the sun’s rays during the day and holds in heat at night. This disruption leads to more extreme temperatures swings that can be harmful to plants and animals.

Trees also play a critical role in absorbing the greenhouse gases that fuel global warming. Fewer forests means larger amounts of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere—and increased speed and severity of global warming.

The quickest solution to deforestation would be to simply stop cutting down trees. Though deforestation rates have slowed a bit in recent years, financial realities make this unlikely to occur.

A more workable solution is to carefully manage forest resources by eliminating clear-cutting to make sure that forest environments remain intact. The cutting that does occur should be balanced by the planting of enough young trees to replace the older ones felled in any given forest. The number of new tree plantations is growing each year, but their total still equals a tiny fraction of the Earth’s forested land.

Pollution

Air pollution has been a serious problem for the forests. The chief agent of environmental damage is acid deposition, or acid rain as it is commonly known. This phenomenon occurs when emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO₂) and oxides of nitrogen (NO_x) react in the atmosphere with water, oxygen, and oxidants to form various acidic compounds. These compounds then fall to the earth in either dry form (such as gas and particles) or wet form (such as rain, snow, and fog). Thus, polluted air can damage trees directly in the dry form or indirectly through its affects on the chemistry of water and soils and by making trees more vulnerable to other biological and environmental stressors. More specifically, acid rain weaken trees by damaging their leaves, limiting the nutrients available to them, or exposing them to toxic substances slowly released from the soil. Acid rain that flows into streams, lakes, and marshes also has serious ecological effects. In watersheds where soils do not have a buffering capacity, acid rain releases aluminum, which is highly toxic to many species of aquatic organisms, from soils into lakes and streams. NRS scientists are study the problems of pollution at many levels, from cellular biochemistry to landscape-level ecology.