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Bird Trees and Suspended Soils! Get the temperate rainforest lingo

Temperate rainforest is a woodland with high rainfall and are normally found in the island’s hills. Good rainforests on the Isle of Man include Glen Helen, Tholt-y-Will Glen and Dhoon Glen.
Rainforests have a special ecology and to understand a rainforest it is helpful to know some of the ecological terms. Here are my favourite temperate rainforest terms:
A Sycamore regrowing after serious fungal attack

 

 

Pheonix tree. Just when you think they have died, perhaps they have fallen over, snapped in two, or their whole crown dies off, a tree will suddenly grow back. What you get is a tree ten times more interesting than before. Some species like oak can phoenix again and again over hundreds of years.

 
Epiphyte. A plant that grows on another plant. Sometimes just moss or lichen, but ferns and larger plants become epiphytes in rainforests as they are less likely to dry out. 

Suspended Soils. In the nooks and crannies of trees, moss, leaves and twigs decay in moist, rainforest conditions and leave behind a bit of compost. The older the tree the larger and more numerous these compost pockets can become. Suspended soil can support little epiphyte gardens of woodland plants in the tops of trees.

Malachory in the forest

Is this slug a spreader of biodiversity?

Bird tree.  Small trees that grow out of other trees; normally sown there via bird poo. With enough suspended soil some of these trees can grow to be quite large. The rainfall of a rainforest can sustain high numbers of bird trees on veteran trees.  

Malacochory. How do bluebells and wood sorrel seeds end up in the tops of trees? The answer may be slugs! Malachory is where seeds are eaten by slugs and pooped out as viable seed to spread them to new places like the tops of trees.

Myrmecochory. Another type of zoochary (animal dispersal of seed). Some seeds are really sneaky, they coat themselves in substances irresistible to ants. Flowers like violets have seeds that can be carried up a tree by ants to become an epiphyte.

Occult precipitation. An ecological term for fog. Rainforest conditions are not really about rainfall, its all about humidity. The hills around Dalby have temperate rainforests that depend as much upon fog as rain. 

Atlantic oak woodland. This was what temperate rainforests used to be called in the olden days (pre 2000!)

Celtic rainforest. Temperate rainforests are found in from New-Zealand, to North America and even Iran and China. A Celtic Rainforest is our local temperate rainforest of Western Scotland, Ireland, Western England, Wales and the uplands of the Isle of Man.  

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