The Amazon tropical rainforest, localized in the north of
South America, is the biggest rainforest in the world, with more than 6 million km
2or 3,700 million miles of extension, considered to be the place with more biological diversity of the planet.
Its ecosystems revolve around the Amazon River watershed, the biggest river in the world in volume, which is born at the Andes in Peru and flows into the Atlantic Ocean in Brazil. The river is also called Uicaiali, Urubamba and Marañón, and also receives the name of Solimões in Brazil before it meets the Negro River in the state of Amazonas. Aside from the Amazon River, other important waterways are some of its tributarians, like the Negro, Tapajós, Xingu, Pastaza, Huallaga, Javari, Içá and Madeira Rivers. The Amazon River is so large that, at some points, one could look at it from one shore and easily mistake it for the ocean, and its watershed drains 20% of all freshwater in the world.
The Amazon meets the Chaco dry forest, the Pantanal wetland and the Cerrado savannah on its South and Southeast, the Andes mountain range on its West, the Llanos grasslands on its North, the Caatinga xeric thorn forest on its East, and the Atlantic Ocean on its Northeast. Its meeting with the sea on the Pará state creates the largest continuous mangrove in the world.
This tropical rainforest covers most of the Amazon basin in South America, mostly composed by plains, plateaus and depressions. About 60% of the rainforest is in Brazil, along with 13% in Peru, 10% in Colombia, and smaller portions in other countries, such as Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela, including the Guiana Amazonian Park in French Guiana. Several species of piranhas, insects, jaguars, macaws, capybaras, manatees, river dolphins, anacondas, primates of several kinds, toucans and electric eels are among the most well known animals that can be found in the region, and the local fauna is much more diverse than that (to the point that a full list of known species would be much longer than the rest of the article's text), with millions of plant species being found there as well. The largest herbivore is the tapir, the largest fish is the arapaima, and important apex predators include the jaguar and the black caiman. Its climate is predominantly humid equatorial, with warm temperatures throughout the whole year, high air humidity and lots of rain — between 1500 and 3600 mm per year, or about 60 and 142 inches.
In fact, the water cycle is so important to the Amazon rainforest that the biome is classified into three different ecorregions based on how its landscapes get affected by rainfall and seasonal river floods: the Igapó forest, next to river shores, is permanently flooded and composed by plants adapted to water; the Várzea note "floodplain" forest gets periodically flooded during wet season; and the Terra Firme note "firm land" forest is normally never flooded, which is why it has the tallest trees and fullest canopies of the biome. Indeed, many land animals in the Amazon are great swimmers, such as jaguars, tapirs, pacas and capybaras, and many fishes are adapted to navigate the flooded woodlands. The largest tropical wetland in the world, however, is not the Amazon, but the Pantanal biome, to its South — differently from the Amazon, it is more akin to a wooded savanna, and its drainage basin revolves around the Paraguay River instead. Besides the Igapó, Várzea and Terra Firme forests, the Amazon biome also sports mangroves, the Campinaranas — scrubby vegetation on sandy soils — and isolated savannah enclaves.
As the rainforests transitions into other biomes, it shapes ecotones between them, with many shared characteristics; the most famous may be the Mata dos Cocais or Maranhão Babaçu Forests, an open rainforest in the transition between the Amazon and the drier Cerrado and Caatinga regions with economically important palm trees.
In MediaThe forest is the subject of several stereotypes across media. Despite what it may seem from some works, the Amazonic region has several modern cities and well-developed economic centers, such as the Manaus free trade zone in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. While the demographic concentration is indeed very low, especially compared to other South American regions, it still has more than 38 million people, a portion of those indigenous populations — both in cities and other communities and in reserves — who have lived in the place for thousands of years. Furthermore, the rich Amazonian wildlife sometimes gets
conflated with animals restricted to the Old World, such as great apes, hippos and crocodiles. Being a basin centered around plain river, the Amazon also has few waterfalls.
Another information is how the Amazonian soil is actually acid and poor in nutrients, and thus pretty bad for agriculture; the reason why the forest thrives is because it recycles its own nutrients through the decomposition of organic matter on the surface of the forest floor and rivers, such as fallen leaves, twigs, excrement, dead animals and plants and others. This makes the deforestation a bigger problem, since without the organic matter for the forest to reutilize, it gets harder to reforest the biome once the rain leaches away the plant litter and important nutrients such as nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus from the soil, not to mention the exposure to erosion. The exception is the "Terra Preta" (black soil in Portuguese), a type of highly fertile soil found through the Amazon basin which, according to more recent theories, was artificially and intentionally created by Indigenous Pre-Columbian Civilizations using organic matter, ashes, charcoal, pottery etc. in order to improve the fertility and help agriculture.
Another common feature is that it is either depicted as if it were contained entirely within Brazil, or extending to places where it does not actually stretch to; like Lima and the northernmost parts of Colombia (Atlántico), the whole Brazilian territory instead of just its Northern region, and sometimes even into Central America, to the point that it seems writers think the Amazon is just a synonym for "South American rainforest", and not a particular region thereof. The rainforest biome that lies in the Brazilian coast — and thus encompasses famous cities like Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and São Paulo — is actually the Atlantic Rainforest, which differs from the Amazon in many elements, such as in plant species, hydrography and especially terrain, given it interacts with the Serra do Mar mountain range.
Another common misconception is the belief that the Amazon is the world's lungs, in reference to how its plants constantly produce oxygen gas through photosynthesis. While it is true that the rainforest produces enormous amounts of oxygen, it is now known that it also consumes all of that very same oxygen when breathing through cellular respiration, since, as a mature forest, the jungle is on the photic compensation point; it is, the amount of oxygen produced and used by the vegetation is almost the same note Reforesting and planting new trees, however, still very much liberates oxygen and takes CO2 off the atmosphere, since, during their growth, trees are capable of capturing tons of carbon dyoxide and transforming them into biomass; depending on the species, these plants can absorb carbon through decades until they reach adulthood, greatly helping in reducing global warming. The true main producers of oxygen gas in the world are the phytoplankton in the ocean, who are not on the compensation point and liberate more O2 than they use due to many factors.
This doesn't mean in any way, however, that this forest isn't a true blessing for the planet in several other ways: besides the vast economical and medical importance its biodiversity has for us, the Amazon also launches countless liters of water into the atmosphere everyday through the evapotranspiration of the plants, which is fundamental to the equilibrium of global ecosystem, climate and the water cycle. If it weren't for the so called "flying rivers" produced by the Amazon, several climates in South America would be much more arid, if not desertic, and many important rivers would dry up; The Brazilian Southeast, for example, would most likely be irreversibly dry and arid if the Amazon were deforested, akin to other regions from the same latitude, like the Namibian desert. Thus, while the Amazon may not be the world's oxygen producer, it is certainly its climate regulator.
Featured in several media, it is a popular setting for a Green Aesop about preserving the rainforests, influenced by the deforestation that has unfortunately occurred in real life. The mass conversion of land into pasture and plantations for intensive agribusiness, Illegal logging and illegal mining have all severely threatened the conservation and protection of the forest, which is increasingly becoming the victim of constant deforestation and wildfires.
See also the Pacific Northwest for the temperate rainforest in western North America. It isn't related to the Amazon warriors from Classical Mythology and the Amazon Brigade, Amazonian Beauty, No Guy Wants an Amazon, All Amazons Want Hercules and Amazon Chaser tropes, though, curiously, the name of the forest possibly is: reportedly, the name of the Amazon River (and by extension, the region) was chosen when Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana's expedition was attacked by a native tribe led by women, which reminded him of the legendary Greek warriors.
Works featuring the Amazon:open/close all folders
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Films — Animation
Films — Live-Action
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