"Joy is an inadequate word for the feeling the naturalist experiences when he first wanders through a Brazilian forest. The elegance of the grasses, the curious parasitic plants, the shimmering green of the leaves, and above all the richness of the vegetation filled me with wonder." Thus wrote Charles Darwin in his diary in 1831 after arriving on the northeast coast of Brazil. Today, however, few areas with protected rain forests remain along the country's 7,500-kilometer-long Atlantic coast, and nowadays, when people talk about Brazil and tropical rain forests, it is usually in connection with the Amazon basin in the Brazilian hinterland. Unlike "virgin forest," by which is usually meant an undisturbed forest in any climatic zone, "rain forest" is associated with certain very specific climatic conditions - although they are found outside the tropics as well, e.g., in northern Canada and southern Chile. The expression "tropical rain forest" refers to forests near the equator in the tropical climatic zone. These forests are always hot, humid and wet, with year-round average monthly temperatures of 18°C and mean annual precipitation of at least 1,8002,000 mm. They generally lie at an altitude of less than 1,000 meters; where altitude increases they are replaced by cooler but equally steamy montane forests. Today, tropical rain forests cover roughly 10 million square kilometers, or seven percent of the earth's land mass. On this seven percent live 90 percent of all primates, 80 percent of all insects and 60 percent of all plant species.
A tropical forest is by no means an impenetrable "green hell," as some adventure films would have us believe: a maximum of three percent of the sunlight filters down to the forest floor, and consequently the vegetation on the forest floor is spare. Only at the edges of the forest, along river courses and in clearings does abundant sunlight allow for the growth of lush bushes and grasses.
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