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What Is the Difference Between a Rainforest and a Jungle?

Many people equate the word "jungle" with a tropical rainforest -- a place of looming trees and dark, dripping, humid depths -- but the actual ecological implication of the word "jungle" is somewhat different than that of the word "rainforest." A hiker may certainly encounter a swath of jungle in Brazil or Guinea but he might also negotiate one on a Montana mountainside or a bottomland thicket in the U.S. South.

Rainforests
- The Quinalt River Valley on Washington's Olympic Peninsula supports a temperate rainforest.
  
  Both tropical and temperate rainforests exist though the former is probably better-known. Definitions of the biomes vary but tend to focus on total annual precipitation and temperature range. Rainforests of tropical-wet and tropical-monsoonal climates may see 60 to 200 inches of rain a year, with warm temperatures year-round. Temperate rainforests are colder due to their higher latitude, but exhibit relatively mild temperatures year-round due to moderating ocean influence, and receive more than 50 inches of annual precipitation. In both types huge, often ancient trees laden with epiphytes, prosper while understory and ground layers are cloaked in shadow.
Jungle
- Fires or logging in a tropical rainforest may result in early-successional jungle.
  
  In its technical usage "jungle" refers to a different landscape than the shadowy, towering rainforest. Derived from Sanskrit the word originally described a feral, overgrown, tangled forest or thicket, therefore a jungle is typically a habitat of smaller stature than a rainforest with a dense understory. If a tract of rainforest is destroyed, as when logging or fire fells the big trees, the increased sunlight reaching the ground might spur a profusion of shrubs and vines, creating a jungle patch. Given time such a habitat may eventually cycle back into a tropical rainforest, but the process may be delayed or routed along a different ecological-succession track if, for example, a clearcut allowed topsoil to be washed away in heavy rains. In that case only hardy, opportunistic jungle or scrub communities will likely persist on the site.
Jungle Landscapes
- The Cascade Range of the Pacific Northwest supports alder jungles in steep drainages.
  
  While often used in the true tropics the word "jungle" can easily be applied to landscapes the world over. A tropical hardwood hammock in South Florida, for example, may greatly resemble a jungle if its larger trees are often toppled or killed by hurricanes or fire and the ecosystem on the whole seems a dense, unruly island of lush vegetation surrounded by sawgrass prairie or open pinelands. In the Northwest slide alder often cloaks the tracks of avalanches or landslides (where larger conifers are demolished), mingling with devil's-club and thimbleberry and creating a nearly impenetrable micro-jungle to the cross-country traveler.
Distribution
- A white-tailed deer might hole up in a temperate jungle-thicket in a forest blowdown.
  
  Tropical rainforests exist along the equatorial belt, occupying large areas in the Americas, central Africa and southeastern Asia. Temperate rainforests mainly develop in certain naturally restricted marine west-coast climates, found in places such as New Zealand, Chile and (most extensively) the northern Pacific coastal ranges of North America. Taken in their broadest definition, jungles are nearly anywhere that profuse vegetation dominates.

Nature