Vegetation
Amazonas is almost entirely covered by the Amazon Rainforest, 98% according to officials, and it is divided into three types of habitat, viz:
- igapos - permanently flooded land, roots of vegetation always submerged
- varzeas - higher than igapos, land is only submerged when rivers are at their highest during the wet season
- low plateau - higher still, never submerged
This wide and varied terrain of the Amazonas region attracts a large number of tourists. The Amazon represents over half of the planet's remaining rainforests and comprises the largest and most species-rich tract of tropical rainforest in the world. Wet tropical forests are the most species-rich biome, and tropical forests in the Americas are consistently more species rich than the wet forests in Africa and Asia. As the largest tract of tropical rainforest in the Americas, the Amazonian rainforests have unparalleled biodiversity. More than 1/3 of all species in the world live in the Amazon Rainforest. and species are discovered on an almost daily base. The largest biodiversity of the planet is present across the State of Amazonas, generating great surprise in its visitors.
The state of Amazonas was officially created by Dom Pedro II in 1850. The state had an era of splendor in the 1850s, at the peak of the rubber boom. However, the economic gains were largely the result of great human suffering: untold thousands of enslaved Amerindian seringueiros (rubber tappers) died through disease and overwork.
By the late 19th century, the Brazilian rubber monopoly was slowly dying, as British and Dutch plantations in South-East Asia were producing cheaper, superior quality rubber, and by 1900 the Amazonas state had fallen into serious economic decline. It was not until the 1950s that federal government policy rescued the state from complete financial ruin.
The state capital of Manaus had once been a rich city (it received street lighting and streetcars before London) but had largely fallen into disrepair after the end of the rubber boom. In 1967, the federal government implemented a plan to revive the city, and today the city is the financial centre of the region.
Read more about this topic: Amazonas (Brazilian State)
Famous quotes containing the word vegetation:
“I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When the ground was partially bare of snow, and a few warm days had dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first tender signs of the infant year just peeping forth with the stately beauty of the withered vegetation which had withstood the winter ... decent weeds, at least, which widowed Nature wears.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It is the color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood.... What a perfect maturity it arrives at! It is the emblem of a successful life concluded by a death not premature, which is an ornament to Nature. What if we were to mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in the midst of our decay, like the poke!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)