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Nature Gallery (Eco Regions)

Temperate Decidious Forests
Forests composed of deciduous species—ones that periodically shed their leaves—grow in well-watered parts of the temperate zone in which a long, warm growing season alternates with a cold winter. Precipitation, as either rain or snow, tends to fall throughout the year.

Deciduous trees, shrubs, and woody vines, whether in the tropics or in the middle latitudes, drop their leaves during a time of drought. For woody plants in the temperate zone, winter is such a time. In regions where the winter is so severe that the ground freezes, water cannot be taken up by the plant roots. But even in milder areas, the cold air and winter winds would quickly suck the moisture from a plant through its broad, thin leaves if they did not first fall.
In the spring, the forest floor is covered with wild flowers blooming in the sunlight before the trees and shrubs regrow their shade-casting leaves. After the long season of growth and reproduction, the changing colours of the leaves signal the beginning of the woody plants’ preparation for winter. The aspect of the forest during the cold season can be quite stark, although some evergreens may offer a little colour. In colder parts of the deciduous forest region, approaching the coniferous forests to the north, transitional mixed forests of deciduous and evergreen species are the rule.

Temperate deciduous forests are almost entirely confined to the Northern Hemisphere, where they occur in three major tracts. In Europe, the zone of deciduous and mixed forests stretches from the British Isles and France through central and eastern Europe as far as the Ural Mountains. In East Asia, these forests characterize the Russian Far East, Northeast China, the Korea Peninsula, and Japan. Their counterparts in North America occupy most of the area from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean and south to the Gulf of Mexico. Although widely separated, these deciduous forests are very similar, not only in appearance but also in the groups of plants that compose them: birches, alders, beeches, oaks, chestnuts, lindens, elms, walnuts, maples, ashes, and hornbeams.

A long history of human occupation of these wooded regions, especially in Eurasia, has reduced many forests to tiny remnants. In parts of western Europe, millennia of forest destruction have resulted in the development of extensive areas of treeless heaths.