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Mature rainforest trees soars up towards the sunlight in an Indonesian forest. The huge roots of these trees not only soak up whatever moisture is available, but also bind the soil together and provide shelter for smaller plants and a wide variety of tropical insects.

What Are Rainforests? C overing about 6 percent of the earth’s land surface, the rainforests form a wooded belt around the tropics. They are places with high, regular rainfall, where the hot, damp conditions encourage many different species of trees and plants to grow. The trees of the world’s rainforests have an important role to play, turning carbon dioxide into roughly 40 percent of the world’s oxygen. Due to this, the rainforests have been called the “lungs” of the planet. Inside a Rainforest The lowland rainforest of West Africa can seem like one of the most inhospitable places on the planet. One way of visiting the forest is by boat, travelling up one of the wide rivers that drain the tropical rainfall from the land. The hot, moist, sunlit banks of the river offer ideal growing conditions, and trees and other plants press down to the water’s edge on both banks. They

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