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About 1 percent of all woodland is characterized as cloud forest, such as this rainforest in Monteverde, Costa Rica. It is hard for vegetation to take root on these steep slopes, and the trees are shorter than in lowland forest.

Conditions could hardly be more different in swamp forests, which are either flooded for part of the year during the wet season, or waterlogged all year round. Here the trees must be able to tolerate the floods or risk drowning like overwatered plants. Another special case is the mangrove forest that often merges with coastal rainforest, carrying the tree cover beyond the tideline and out into the sea itself. The world’s most exten- sive mangrove forest covers the Sundarbans swamp region in

What Are Rainforests? 13