Amazon Rainforest, River, & Basin | LAC Geo

The Amazon Rainforest is a biogeographical region in northern South America that occupies the Amazon Basin, a drainage basin of the Amazon River and its tributaries in northern South America. Sometimes called Amazônia, nine countries have some parts of the Amazon region within their borders.

Amazônia

Amazon Rainforest

The Amazon Rainforest is a biogeographical region in northern South America that occupies the Amazon Basin, a drainage basin of the Amazon River and its tributaries in northern South America.

This tropical rainforest is a moist broadleaf forest in the Amazon Biome and covers an area of approximately 6,000,000 sq km (2,300,000 sq mi).

Sometimes called Amazônia, nine countries have some parts of the Amazon Rainforest within their borders.

Most of the forest is contained within Brazil, with 60% of the rainforest, followed by Peru with 13%, Colombia with 10%, and minor amounts in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana.

Comprising about 40% of Brazil’s total area, the Guiana Highlands bounds the Amazon region to the north, the Andes Mountains to the west, the Brazilian central plateau to the south, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east.

The Amazon represents over half of the planet’s remaining rainforests. It comprises the world’s largest and most biodiverse tract of tropical rainforest, with an estimated 390 billion individual trees divided into 16,000 species.

Wet tropical forests are the most species-rich Biome and tropical forests in the Americas are consistently more species-rich than the moist forests in Africa and Asia.

As the largest tract of tropical rainforest in the Americas, the Amazonian rainforests have unparalleled biodiversity. One in ten known species in the world lives in the Amazon Rainforest. This constitutes the world’s most extensive collection of living plants and animal species.

Map depicting the Amazon River drainage basin with the Amazon River highlighted

Amazon River System

The Amazon River is the largest river by discharge volume of water in the world; by some definitions, it is the longest. As measured from the headwaters of the Ucayali-Apurímac river system, the total length of the river, high in the Andes Mountains in southern Peru, is at least 6,400 km (4,000 mi).

The Amazon River and its tributaries flow through the countries of Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Brazil before emptying into the Atlantic Ocean. More significant than the following seven largest independent rivers combined, the Amazon River represents 20% of the global riverine discharge to the ocean.

The Amazon River and its tributaries are characterized by extensive forested areas that become flooded every rainy season. Every year, the river rises more than 9 m (30 ft), flooding the surrounding forests, known as várzea (“flooded forests”). The Amazon’s flooded forests are the most extensive example of this habitat type worldwide.

Amazon Basin

The Amazon Basin is the part of South America drained by the Amazon River and its tributaries. The Amazon drainage basin covers about 35 percent of the South American continent.

The vast Amazon Basin is the most extensive lowland in Latin America and has an area of about 2.7 million sq mi (7 million sq km).

The basin includes the greater part of Brazil and Peru, significant parts of Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia, and a small area of Venezuela.

Outline map depicting the extent of the Amazon biome (white outline) and Amazon basin (blue outline)

Amazon Biome

The Amazon Biome roughly corresponds to the Amazon Basin. However, it excludes areas of the Andes to the west and the Cerrado (tropical savanna) to the south. It includes lands to the northeast extending to the Atlantic Ocean with similar vegetation to the Amazon Basin.

There are 53 major ecosystems and mover600 land and freshwater habitat types. Of the ecosystems, 34 are forest areas covering 78% of the Biome, six are Andean covering 1.5%, five are floodplains covering 5.83%, five are savanna covering 12.75%, and two are tropical steppes covering 1.89%.

The Brazilian Amazon holds 30 of the 53 ecosystems, of which 19 are forests occupying 77.5% of the area. The borders of the Biome hold ecotones where it blends into other biomes, such as the Cerrado. Within and across the ecosystems of the Biome, there is enormous biological diversity.