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Concept
Temperate rainforest
Summary
Temperate rainforests are rainforests with coniferous or broadleaf forests that occur in the temperate zone and receive heavy rain.
Temperate rainforests occur in oceanic moist regions around the world: the Pacific temperate rainforests of North American Pacific Northwest as well as the Appalachian temperate rainforest of the Eastern U.S. Sun Belt; the Valdivian temperate rainforests of southwestern South America; the rainforests of New Zealand and southeastern Australia; northwest Europe (small pockets in Great Britain and larger areas in Ireland, southern Norway and northern Iberia); southern Japan; the Black Sea–Caspian Sea region from the southeasternmost coastal zone of the Bulgarian coast, through Turkey, to Georgia, and northern Iran.
The moist conditions of temperate rainforests generally support an understory of mosses, ferns and some shrubs and berries. Temperate rainforests can be temperate coniferous forests or temperate broadleaf and mixed forests.
For temperate rainforests of North America, Alaback's definition is widely recognized:
Annual precipitation over (KJ)
Mean annual temperature is between 4 and 12 °C (39 and 54 °F).
However, required annual precipitation depends on factors such as distribution of rain over the year, temperatures over the year and fog presence, and definitions in other regions of the world differ considerably. For example, Australian definitions are ecological-structural rather than climatic:
Closed canopy of trees excludes at least 69% of the sky.
Forest is composed mainly of tree species which do not require fire for regeneration, but with seedlings able to regenerate under shade and in natural openings.
The latter would, for example, exclude a part of the temperate rainforests of western North America, as Coast Douglas-fir, one of its dominant tree species, requires stand-destroying disturbance to initiate a new cohort of seedlings. The North American definition would in turn exclude a part of temperate rainforests under definitions used elsewhere.
Official source
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