Tropical and Temperate Forests

The other day I took a mini excursion to a Colombian rainforest. Our guide was an environmentalist that lived in that same forest and told us about a difference between tropical and temperate forests.

The individual flora in a tropical environment don’t live long, but together the tropical forest is lively, thriving, and resilient.

But in temperate environments like Canada, the individual flora live long (think of the evergreen tree) but the ecosystem together isn’t as biodiverse and lively.

In short, tropical forests have weak individuals and strong teams, and temperate forests have strong individuals and weak teams.

I thought that was interesting.