Rainforest Canopy

The rainforest has estimated seventy to ninety percent of life living and existing in its trees above the shaded forest floor. A primary tropical rainforest is made up at least five layers. These layers are the overstory, the canopy, the understory, the shrub layer, and the forest floor. Each layer has an important role being played and also has its own unique animal species and plants that interact with the ecosystem around them.

The overstory is composed of the scattered surfacing trees which ascend twenty to a hundred feet above the rest of the canopy. Trees in this layer receive full sunlight. The canopy is the thick ceiling of closely spaced trees and their branches, the understory on the other hand are the more widely spaced, smaller trees that form a broken layer beneath the canopy. The shrub layer is distinguished by its shrubby species and young trees that grow only five to twenty feet off the forest floor. The forest floor composes the ground layer of the forest made up of trunks of trees, low-growing vegetation, and fungus. This layer of the rainforest can vary from forest to forest but serves as a good representation of vegetative and repeated structure of the forest.

The rainforest canopy is perhaps the most important layer of the rainforest. This layer has the most plants and animal life. The rainforest canopy can go as high as forty five meters above the forest floor. This height is controlled by competition of light, the fewer the high trees, others trees will be forced to grow taller in search of light. The rainforest is largely dependent on moisture and moisture control by the canopy for its survival.

Rainforest canopy can stretch to immense distances. In spite of the overlapping tree branches of the rainforest canopy, canopy trees rarely intertwine or even touch. The reason behind the trees not touching still remains to be a mystery, but is theorized that it serves as a protection from invasion of tree eating caterpillars and diseases of trees like leaf blight. Canopy animals and dwellers must have the ability to settle these tree gaps by gliding, leaping, climbing or flying to survive. Animals existing in the canopy play an important part in the rainforest ecology too by knocking down fruits from trees allowing the terrestrial animals to nourish for a longer period of time because they do not have to wait for the longer time the fruit will fall by itself.

The billions of leaves of the rainforest canopy, acts as tiny solar plates that provide a source of power for the forest by changing sunlight to energy through photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is the process of plants converting atmospheric carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and simple sugars and since there is a high rate of photosynthesis of the canopy trees, the plants have an advance yield of fruits, flowers, seeds and leaves which supports the ample variety of animal life.

The rainforest canopy also plays an important role in modifying regional and global climate since it is the main site of the exchange of heat, water vapor and atmospheric gases. Aside from gathering solar energy and modifying the climate, the rainforest canopy also shields the understory from harmful sunlight, heavy rainfall, drying winds, and retains the moisture of the forest below.