Importance of Cloud Forests
- Watershed function. Because of the cloud stripping strategy the effective rainfall can be doubled in dry seasons and increase the wet season rainfall by about 10 percent. Experiments of Costin and Wimbush (1961) showed that the tree canopies of non-cloud forests intercept and evaporate 20 percent more of the precipitation than cloud forests, which means a loss to the land component of the hydrological cycle.
- Vegetation. Tropical montane cloud forests are not as species-rich as tropical lowland forests but they provide the habitats for many species that are found nowhere else. For example, the Cerro de la Neblina, a cloud covered mountain in the south of Venezuela accommodates many shrubs, orchids and insectivorous plants which are restricted to this mountain only.
- Fauna. The endemism in animals is also very high. In Peru, more than one third of the 270 endemic birds, mammals and frogs are found in cloud forests. One of the best known cloud forest mammal is the Mountain Gorilla (Gorilla b. beringei). Many of those endemic animals have important functions such as seed dispersal and forest dynamics in this ecosystems.
Read more about this topic: Cloud Forest
Famous quotes containing the words importance, cloud and/or forests:
“We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“These boys who love their mother
who loves men, who passes on
her sons to other women;
The cloud across the sky. The windy pines.
the trickle gurgle in the swampy meadow
this is our body.”
—Gary Snyder (b. 1930)
“It seems to me that we do not know nearly enough about ourselves; that we do not often enough wonder if our lives, or some events and times in our lives, may not be analogues or metaphors or echoes of evolvements and happenings going on in other people?—or animals?—even forests or oceans or rocks?—in this world of ours or, even, in worlds or dimensions elsewhere.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)