Rainforest Facts for Kids

Imagine a rainforest as a giant, leafy skyscraper with four main floors.

The third floor, called the canopy, is the thickest part, often 20 feet (6 meters) thick with branches and leaves.

This green roof is so dense that it blocks 98% of the sunlight from reaching the dark floor below. Talk about shade!

Because it gets all the sun, the canopy is where most of the rainforest's animal species hang out.

The Amazon is the world's largest tropical rainforest, and its size is seriously mind-boggling.

It covers an enormous 6.7 million square kilometers!

That is roughly twice the size of India or 28 times the size of the UK! You would need a super-fast jet to even see it all.

In the emergent layer, the very top of the forest, trees compete to touch the sky.

The tallest tropical tree recorded, a Yellow Meranti in Malaysia, measures an incredible 330.7 feet (100.8 meters) tall.

That is taller than 30 school buses stacked up on top of each other! Wow, what a view from the top!

Rainforests are like the world's biggest pharmacy, full of natural ingredients!

In fact, 25% of all the medicines used in modern Western countries come from rainforest plants.

Think about the medicine for childhood leukemia or malaria—many started as a leaf or bark in the jungle!

The Amazon holds at least 10% of the Earth's known biodiversity, but that's just what we've found!

Scientists in the Amazon discover a brand new species of animal or plant on average every two days.

With 2.5 million different insects possibly living there, imagine all the amazing creatures still waiting to be named!

Welcome to the forest floor, the final layer, where almost no light gets through!

Because the layers above block so much, only about 2% of the sunlight makes it down to the ground.

This darkness means very few plants can grow there, so it is surprisingly open and calm—even during a storm!

The rainforest isn't just home to animals- it's home to amazing human cultures too!

The Amazon is where over 400 different indigenous groups live, which is more than anywhere else on Earth.

These groups speak around 300 different languages and have lived with the forest for thousands of years- they are its true experts!

This is the tough part- the rainforest is disappearing way too fast.

The rate of deforestation in the Amazon is sadly equivalent to losing 5 football pitches of forest every single minute!

That's like wiping out an entire soccer stadium of trees before your favorite cartoon even ends. That's why protecting it is so important!

Those long, winding plants you see everywhere in the jungle? They are vines, and the rainforest loves them.

A wild 90% of all the different types of vines in the whole world live in these wet forests.

They climb up the trees, creating jungle highways for monkeys and sloths!

It rains a lot, but did you know the trees help make it happen?

The trees in the Amazon release a gigantic 20 billion tonnes of water into the air every single day.

This process helps create the rain that falls back down on the forest and even on faraway countries like Argentina!