Rainforests are amazingly diverse stores of animal and plant life. A third of the world’s plant life grows in the rainforest and each square metre can support up to 80kg of living material (biomass). Incredibly, more than half of the world’s animal and plant species live in the rainforest, and a single hectare (an area of land measuring 100 metres by 100 metres) can contain 200 different tree species and over 40,000 species of insect. In ten hectares (0.1 square kilometres) of Malaysian rainforest, 780 different species of tree were discovered. That’s more than the total number of tree species that are native to the whole of the USA and Canada!

The plants of the rainforest are well adapted to their environment. Trees often grow to 60m tall (the tallest ever recorded grew to 83m). Their leaves are concentrated high up in the canopy. Many have huge ?buttress? roots to help anchor them to the ground and soak up nutrients. Below them, there are other plants adapted to living in the shrub and floor layers of the forest.

Amazingly, given the vast number of species rainforests support, their soils are shallow and acidic. In fact,  they are among the poorest in the world, and heavy rainfall quickly washes away any nutrients that are not taken up by the trees. Rainforests are able to thrive because they feed on themselves – dead plant and animal matter rots quickly on the forest floor and the shallow rooted trees quickly absorb the nutrients.