Rainforest
Welcome to Earth’s oldest land-based ecosystem.
Infinite miles of green stretch above and ahead, boundless blankets of trees, ferns and bromeliads. Water lives everywhere — pattering down from the clouds, suspended as ethereal mist in the air, dripping from the leaves.
A soundtrack of birds, monkeys and insects hums electric, murmuring below the forest’ s emerald tiers, which are home to more than half of the world’ s plant and animal species — one of the planet’ s most important bastions of biodiversity.
This is the rainforest.
Beneath the Canopy
of the Cloud Forest
Under dense shrouds of mist lie some of Sri Lanka’s most biodiverse ecosystems. Naturalist Rohan Pethiyagoda has been on a lifelong quest to conserve these unique rainforests — and inspire other Sri Lankans to take up the charge.
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As suggested by their name , the tropical montane cloud forests of Sri Lanka look eerie and ethereal from a distance. Moist, warm air from the lowlands is pushed up against the mountains, cooling and condensing as the air temperatures drop to form the pervasive mist that defines this type of high-altitude rainforest. This process is so predictable that, over millennia, entire ecosystems evolved to take advantage of the abundant moisture — amidst the clouds, a tangle of low trees, ferns and moss thrives, the silence broken only by the songs of frogs, birds and thousands of other endemic species.
Sri Lanka’s mountains used to be full of these biodiverse forests, until the island became a global producer of tea in the 19th century and trees were cleared to make way for expansive tea plantations. For decades, these cloud forests seemed on the verge of vanishing altogether.
Pioneering
REGROWTH
Naturalist Rohan Pethiyagoda grew up in Sri Lanka, taking trips into nature with his father that instilled in him a deep love for the country’s remaining cloud forests — now just “little islands in this vast ocean of tea.”
“The surviving forest has only about 100 square miles that can be classified as tropical, mountain and cloud forest,” he said.
Pethiyagoda has since been recognized as one of Sri Lanka’s leading naturalists and taxonomists, credited with discovering more than 150 new species — but his initial work centered on conserving the cloud forests that first captured his heart.
Since childhood, Pethiyagoda wondered if it would be possible to join these little cloud forest “islands” together by restoring abandoned lands to their earlier state. In the late 1990s, he acquired a 50-acre former tea plantation and worked to integrate an innovative regrowth system that reintroduced shade trees to the land, allowing the native forest to repopulate the terrain at its own pace.
The project became known as the Agrapatana Montane Forest Restoration Initiative, for which Pethiyagoda was named a Rolex Laureate in 2000. The Rolex award, he said, helped him and his team fund conservation science measures like biodiversity monitoring.
“The initiative started as an experiment, and now 20 years on, we have some answers to those questions,” he said. “We’ve found some methods for speeding up the restoration process, like which native species of plants are best adapted to growing in these circumstances. But we don’t have all the answers.”
The
FUTURE
of the forest
Today, cloud forests remain under stress from Sri Lanka’s dense population and constant need for new agricultural lands, from an increase in temperatures at higher altitudes that disrupt the formation of clouds, and from the introduction of non-native species that crowd out native plants. Far from dissuading Pethiyagoda, he’s now pushing forward on an ambitious plan to restore a 700-hectare lot adjacent to Horton Plains National Park.
Forest conservation has also inspired in him a larger mission to educate and encourage a new generation of Sri Lankan naturalists. In addition to his taxonomy work, Pethiyagoda started a bilingual publishing house for books on nature and biodiversity, written in both English and in the local language, Sinhala, in which hardly any books on nature had previously been authored.
Within generations of Sri Lankans both young and old, the support for conservation work runs deep — which gives Pethiyagoda hope that cloud forest restoration will become a centuries-long commission.
“Conservation consciousness is very deeply ingrained into the people of Sri Lanka because of its heritage value, not because of its economic value,” Pethiyagoda says of the majority Buddhist country. “That helps because every child is conservation conscious.”
All Beneath the Cloud Canopy photography ©Rolex/Kesara Ratnavibhushana
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listen
PLANET VISIONARIES PODCAST: SEASON 2, EPISODE 2
Hear Rohan Pethiyagoda in conversation with "Free Solo" star Alex Honnold. Honnold hosts this podcast series, which explores the extraordinary work of pioneers who are safeguarding our planet for future generations.
Eavesdrop on
the Amazon
Hear the ambient sounds of the rainforest buzzing alive. Mix sounds to create your own unique soundscape.
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Gibbon calls
Hungry macaws
Tree frogs
Mantled howler monkey
Leopard call
Insects
Acoustics via Rainforest Connection and Rolex Laureate
Topher White Hear more sounds and learn more about Topher
The next generation of
rainforest conservation
Recently hailed on a list of 50 people changing the world, Callie Broaddus is galvanizing Generation Z to fight climate change via one of our most powerful tools for combatting the crisis — rainforests.
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Callie Broaddus is a nature photographer and the founder and executive director of Reserva: The Youth Land Trust, a nonprofit devoted to bridging the gap between youth activists and biodiversity conservation. The organization recently completed funding of the Dracula Youth Reserve in Ecuador — the world’s first entirely youth-funded nature reserve. She is a member of the Rainforest Trust Council and was in the inaugural class of the Explorers Club: Fifty People Changing the World the World Needs to Know About.
Below, Broaddus speaks on the rainforest’s role in helping fight climate change and why young people are so enthusiastic about joining together to preserve these crucial ecosystems.
What is it about the rainforest that made you devote your career to preserving it?
From a practical sense, it’s incredibly urgent what we’re doing right now to protect and preserve species and habitats. Species are going extinct at a thousand times the natural rate. That’s not okay. Half of the Earth's biodiversity, or land-based biodiversity, is contained in rainforests. So just from a productivity standpoint, the more you can pour your efforts into conserving tropical rainforest, the more bang for the buck you’ll have.
And why focus on young people?
Practically half the Earth is under 31. No matter how you define youth, that’s pretty young. We’re missing a massive opportunity to affect change if we don’t ask half the world to participate in making that change. When I say “participate,” I mean taking direct action. Not, “Go educate yourself.” But rather actually presenting [them] with facts and then presenting them with options for direct impact. Then, of course, young people are also going to have to live with the changes that we’re making the longest.
Of all the different issues affecting our planet, climate change has arguably risen to the forefront of environmental awareness in recent decades. How do you see rainforest conservation as playing a role in climate action and policy?
I think humans have always historically underestimated nature — both in its frailty and also its resilience. Nature-based solutions (i.e. approaches that harness the power of natural capital and ecosystems to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions) need to be integrated into as many climate solutions as possible. We need to apply the precautionary principle that we should side with making sure that we’re not doing something to harm nature. Also, it may be that nature has benefits that we’re not expecting.
That’s sort of a vague answer — from a practical perspective, it would be ridiculous not to embrace the benefits of nature to solve the climate crisis. We can go about trying to invent machines that can take carbon out of the air, but [trees] grow for free, if you just leave them alone.
What do you think is the future of rainforest conservation, especially as more and more young people get involved through missions like yours? How do you see the next — I don’t know — 10 to 50 to a million years playing out?
It’s going to be a two-phase approach. Number one, we have to stop the bleeding. We are losing forests at a much faster rate than we should be, and marine ecosystems as well. We need to stop the loss of nature first — we need to do that for our survival.
Then we need to start building those [protected] spaces. There is no novel solution or shortcut that is going to turn the tide on these problems. We need to firmly protect what remains, halt deforestation by changing the way the global economy relies on nature to inflate its productivity. Then we need to implement a plan that will allow the reforestation, or the recovery, of tracks of land that have already been lost.
I think about three main ways you can make a difference. Number one, you can change behavior either individually or as a community, or as a family, so you can reduce your reliance on things that involve extraction from nature. Number two, you can give time. Or number three, you can give money. What I tell people is that you need to identify your particular strengths. If you say, “I don’t have one,” that’s not true — you do. You have a strength. Whatever it is about you, there’s something that you can do well that you can convert into raising or making money to make a real change.
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All The Next Generation of Rainforest Conservation photography ©Callie Broaddus
Life Among the
Forest Layers
Most rainforests are structured in four distinct but interdependent
layers — each its own diverse ecosystem with differing quantities of
sunlight,
air circulation and plant and animal life.
Take a trip through the layers with Lucas Bustamante, a biologist and wildlife conservation photojournalist based in Ecuador. Bustamante uses his photography and eco-tourism initiative, Tropical Herping, to inspire others to care about, and conserve, the rainforest’s incredible biodiversity. Click on the hotspots to learn more about each animal.
Scroll down to navigate
through the forest
Emergent layer
Here the most towering trees — over 200 feet tall — dominate
the rainforest skyline. Sunlight and wind abound here,
creating a lively home for agile fauna like birds of
prey, bats and butterflies.
“Macaws are the largest parrots in the world. They are thought to be important to seed dispersion and forest regeneration, owing to their diet of fruit. Macaws are also able to eat fruit that is toxic to other animals, possibly because they also eat clay found at riverbanks, which can help the digestion of harsh chemicals.”
Lucas Bustamante
Bustamante captured this shot of a blue Morpho Menelaus butterfly in the rainforest of Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park. “These butterflies’ colors are not a result of pigmentation,” he explained, “but rather are an example of iridescence produced by the structural coloration of their wings’ scales.”
Lucas Bustamante
Canopy layer
A vast umbrella of leaves and branches, the canopy comprises one of the densest layers of the rainforest, shielding the ecosystems below from sunlight, rain and wind while providing an abundant home for most of the forest’s animals. Fruit supplies a feast for birds, monkeys, and insects unafraid to make the vertical journey.
“Treehoppers are tiny insects famous for their unusual, almost alien-looking shapes and colors. They’re crucial for symbiotic relationships with ants, wasps and geckos.”
Lucas Bustamante
“Sloths sleep around 15 to 18 hours per day. They mainly eat young leaves and have a meaningful symbiotic relationship with some algae, which attach to their backs and give them a greenish look. This helps the sloths to camouflage and avoid their natural predators, such as eagles.”
Lucas Bustamante
“Unusually for toucans, these pale-mandibled araçaris roost socially throughout the year, with up to six adults and fledged young sleeping in the same tree hole. They are mainly fruit-eaters, but will take insects and other small prey, including other birds.”
Lucas Bustamante
“Squirrel monkeys have a very active life. They spend almost the whole day jumping from branch to branch looking for insects and fruit, which are their primary food sources.”
Lucas Bustamante
Understory layer
Young trees, orchids and shrubs thrive here where it’s dark,
quiet and humid. Dimness aids predators like jaguars and snakes in gliding towards their targets undetected. Creatures from small tree frogs to stately gorillas in the Central African rainforest call the shadows home.
“Small and arboreal, this venomous eyelash viper is characterized by the superciliary scales above its eyes. They’re mainly nocturnal, consuming small rodents, frogs, lizards and small birds. It’s not known to be an aggressive snake but will not hesitate to strike if harassed.”
Lucas Bustamante
“Jaguars are the real kings of the jungle. Together with the harpy eagle, caimans, giant otters and anaconda, they are the top predators of the Amazon Basin. This means that, once they’re adults, nothing preys on them.”
Lucas Bustamante
Forest layer
Enter the forest’s most mysterious layer. Almost no sunlight permeates this low, and rain takes upwards of 10 minutes to trickle down from the canopy. Here, decomposers break down fallen organic matter into rich soil, returning nutrients to the ecosystems above. Amidst the dark, rodents and anteaters find on the floor an auspicious feast.
“The Andean mouse-opossum is a small marsupial that lives mainly in the ground and lower vegetation. They are nocturnal and prey primarily on insects and arachnids, but also fruits and small vertebrates like frogs and lizards. They are essential regulators of insect populations. I captured this one eating a moth.”
Lucas Bustamante
“This fringed leaf frog is a rarely seen species, known for its reclusive nature. It often suffers habitat loss caused by human activities. It actually lives in the canopy of primary tropical lowland rainforests, and only descends for breeding, which takes place in small water pools that have collected in fallen trees.”
Lucas Bustamante
All Life Among the Forest Layers photography ©Lucas Bustamante