Panorama: Madagascar tropical rainforest

Title Info
Source Dan L. Perlman
Ecosystems Forests
Forests Tropical rainforest
Lessons Panoramas
Date July 12, 2007
Location Nosy Mangabe Island,Madagascar,Africa
Panorama of Tropical rainforest near ocean, N Madagascar
Related materials: Panoramas;Tropical rainforest
You may want to discuss with your students how this ecosystem type appears to differ from other tropical ecosystems such as tropical dry forests, or savannas -- and how this tropical rainforest looks like rainforests in other regions of the world, although they may have no species in common.

Panorama Viewing: Click the "View Panorama" button to see an interactive panorama. Click and drag your mouse in any direction to view other parts of the scene; press the Shift key to zoom in to see details and press Ctrl to zoom out.
We recommend using the Deval VR viewer for seeing panoramas that do NOT have sound and the QuickTime viewer for panoramas WITH sound.

Most tropical rainforests look and feel much the same: very warm, humid, full of very large trees, with a canopy far overhead -- but the species found in these rainforests can be very different from forest to forest. Given the very high proportion of endemic species in Madagascar's ecosystems, this forest and a Costa Rican rainforest probably have no more than a handful of species in common -- and they may share none at all.

Madagascar, the world's fourth-largest island, is also one of the world's biodiversity hotspots. The island has a land mass about the size of Montana and Idaho combined, and at its closest is little more than 300 miles (500 km) from Africa--yet it has been isolated from the continent for approximately 160 million years. The vast majority of the island's species are endemic (found nowhere else in the world) and the native ecosystems are under heavy threat from human encroachment, especially deforestation for subsistence agriculture. The island contains several very different ecosystem types, ranging from tropical rainforest in the northeast through shrublands and dry forests to spiny desert (or spiny forest) in the south. Many ecologists agree that as an ecosystem type, spiny desert is itself endemic, that there is nothing else like it in the world. The table below, with data from Conservation International, shows just how high a proportion of Madagascar's species are found nowhere else on earth. In fact, many of the island's species are endemic to just a single ecosystem type or even just a small portion of an ecosystem type.

Taxonomic Group

Species

Endemic Species

Percent Endemism

Plants

13,000

11,600

89.2

Mammals

155

144

92.9

Birds

310

181

58.4

Reptiles

384

367

95.6

Amphibians

230

229

99.6

Freshwater Fishes

164

97

59.1

 

 

 

 
Conservation International. Madagascar and the Indian Ocean Islands.
Click here to read about this biodiversity hotspot.