Ocean water is a mixture of dissolved gasses and salts in pure water.
Rainforests are a kind of forest habitat. They are found in warm places, and are full of many tall trees and leafy plants. It’s called ‘rainforest’ because it also gets a lot of rain every year, helping all the plants grow.
Because rainforests are warm, wet and dense, they are full of life – millions of different kinds of plants and animals live there, and some haven’t even been discovered yet! It’s important to protect rainforest habitats for all the creatures who live there, and for humans too – rainforests produce 20% of the oxygen that all of us in the world need to breathe.
Rainforest habitats are forests located around the tropics, which is a zone around the equator.
Rainforests are different from other forests in the world because they get a lot of rain every year – this makes them damp and humid.
There are five main spots where rainforest habitats are located – Africa, Asia, Australia, Central America and South America.
The largest rainforest habitat in the world is the Amazon rainforest in South America. Most of the Amazon rainforest is in Brazil.
Rainforests are full of millions of different kinds of plants, animals and insects – some haven’t even been discovered yet!
About 80% of life in the rainforest can be found in the canopy, which is where the branches and leaves of most of the trees join up to form a kind of umbrella.
Other layers of the rainforest are emergents, which are trees that grow a bit taller than the canopy; the understory, which is the bit just below the canopy; then shrubs below that; then the ground.
Animals and reptiles move around the canopy by flying, jumping, swinging on vines and gliding.
We depend on rainforests because they are so full of life, and all the plants and trees produce around 20% of the oxygen in the world that we need to breathe.
There are many things threatening rainforests and actually making them smaller rather than growing larger. It’s important to protect these habitats by caring for the environment.