Forests Around the World : Amazon Forest

Thursday, July 10, 2025

Forests Around the World

Redwood Forests

Located in the United States, along the coast of northern California, the forest has the tallest trees in the world to the tiniest fungi.

The forests are home to some of the largest and oldest trees on earth that grow 300-350 feet tall and 16-18 feet across, with record specimens soaring 360 feet.
The Redwood National and State Parks (RNSP) comprising Redwood National Park, Del Norte Coast, Jedediah Smith, and Prairie Creek Redwoods State Parks combined contain 133,000 acres. These parks protect 45% of all remaining Coastal Redwood old-growth forests.

Compiled By Liji Varghese

Black Forest

Also known as Schwarzwald (German), these forests are referred to as black due to the dense growth of conifers that block out most of the light inside the forest. Spread across an area of approximately 12,000 km2, the forest is a wooded mountain range in Baden-Württemberg, south-western Germany.

Logging and land use changes have reduced the forest to a fraction of its original size. Many high peaks and hills are covered with only primary growth, as trees on hundreds of acres of mountaintops where downed by the 1999 storm Lothar.

Cloud forests

Found in Asia and Central America, these forests are known as nature’s water towers which play an important role in evaporation and precipitation. Though located around the world these forests are particularly threatened in Central America due to logging, non-native species and development.

Borneo Forest

One of the richest rain forests in the world, Borneo lowland rain forest lies within the Tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests Biome, of Borneo island in south-east Asia. It has been divided into seven eco-regions by the World Wildlife Fund.

More than half of the forest area has been cleared for logging and conversion of natural forests to rubber, oil palm and industrial timber plantations. It is believed that the entre forest will soon disappear due to little or no law enforcement in Indonesia.

Gola Forest

Part of the Upper Guinea forest, the Gola forest is close to the Liberian border covering 75,000 hectares of area.

Home to chimpanzees, leopards, forest elephants and more than 250 species of bird, almost less than 30% of forest remains due to widespread forest clearance for agriculture purpose, charcoal mining and timber.

Boreal Forest

Comprising about one third of the circumpolar boreal forest, the region covers almost 60% of the country’s land area and is one of the most famous forests in Canada.

Russia, Scandinavian and Nordic countries are also home to the boreal forests.

The boreal forest has suffered little deforestation, given that provincial laws ensure that areas harvested by the forest sector are replanted or regenerated naturally.

Congo Forest

Spread across the basin of the Congo river and its tributaries in Central Africa this tropical moist broadleaf forest is world’s second largest forest covering 700,000 square miles (1,800,000 km2) in six countries.

Home 1,000 bird species and 400 mammal species, this tropical forest has an increased threat from the constantly increasing population growth, logging, shifting agriculture and the oil and mining industries.

Amazon Forest

Home to about 2.5 million insect species, tens of thousands of plants and some 2, 000 birds and mammals, this moist broadleaf forest covers five and a half million square kilometers, out of the total seven million square kilometers of the Amazon Basin of South America.

Deforestation due to human settlement and development is one of the major threats to the world’s biggest rainforest.