In the past subsistence agriculture was the primary driver of rainforest conversion, but today industrial agriculture - especially monoculture and livestock production - is the dominant driver of rainforest loss worldwide. The biggest cause of deforestation is conversion of forest land for agriculture.
While rainforests are critically important to humanity, they are rapidly being destroyed by human activities. Rainforests are also the source of many useful products upon which local communities depend. Rainforests provide important ecological services, including storing hundreds of billions of tons of carbon, buffering against flood and drought, stabilizing soils, influencing rainfall patterns, and providing a home to wildlife and Indigenous people. Brazil has the largest extent of rainforest of any country on Earth. Rainforests also exist on some the Caribbean islands, in Central America, in India, on scattered islands in the South Pacific, in Madagascar, in West and East Africa outside the Congo Basin, in Central America and Mexico, and in parts of South America outside the Amazon. The Congo Basin and Southeast Asia, respectively, have the second and third largest areas of tropical rainforest. The bulk of the world's tropical rainforest occurs in the Amazon Basin in South America. These forest types form a mosaic of vegetation types which contribute to the incredible diversity of the tropics. Tropical rainforests merge into other types of forest depending on the altitude, latitude, and various soil, flooding, and climate conditions. Tropical rainforests typically occur in the equatorial zone between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, latitudes that have warm temperatures and relatively constant year-round sunlight.
While tropical rainforests are the best-known type of rainforest and the focus of this section of the web site, rainforests are actually found widely around the world, including temperate regions in Canada, the United States, and the former Soviet Union. Rainforests are forest ecosystems characterized by high levels of rainfall, an enclosed canopy and high species diversity.
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