Question

What type of vegetation is found in equatorial region? Give its five characteristics.

Answer 1

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i. A Great Variety of Vegetation:

The equatorial vegetation comprises a multitude of evergreen trees that yield tropical hardwood, e.g. mahogany, ebony, greenheart, cabinet woods and dyewoods. There are smaller palm trees, climbing plants like the lianas or rattan which may be hundreds of feet long and epiphytic and parasitic plants that live on other plants. Under the trees grow a wide variety of ferns, orchids and lalang.

ii. A Distinct Layer Arrangement:

From the air, the tropical rain forest appears like a thick canopy of foliage, broken only where it is closed by large rivers or cleared for cultivation.  Their slender trunks pierce skywards with wide-spread branches at the top. The smaller trees beneath form the next layer, and the ground is rooted with ferns and herbaceous plants which can tolerate shade. Because the trees cut out most of the sunlight the undergrowth is not dense.

iii. Multiple Species:

Unlike the temperate forests, where only a few species occur in a particular area, the trees of the tropical rain forests are not found in pure stands of a single species. It has been esti­mated that in the Malaysian jungle as many as 200 species of trees may be found in an acre of forest.

This has made commercial exploitation of tropical timber a most difficult task. Many of the tropical hardwoods do not float readily on water and this makes haulage an expensive matter.

iv. Forest Clearings:

Many parts of the virgin tropical rain forests have been cleared either for lumbering or shifting cultivation. When these clear­ings are abandoned, less luxuriant secondary forests, called belukar in Malaysia, spring up. These are characterized by short trees and very dense under­growth. In the coastal areas and brackish swamps, mangrove forests thrive.