Photos: On International Day of Forests, a look at the largest forests in the world

Representative image

The world is marking the International Day of Forests today. The United Nations General Assembly had in 2012 proclaimed March 21 as the day to create awareness about the importance of forests.

To celebrate the day, here is a look at the world's largest forests.

(Image credit: AFP)

The massive Amazon biome spans Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Suriname and Guyana. Its landscape contains 1.4 billion acres of dense forests, which is half the Earth’s remaining tropical forests, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature. The health of Amazon is crucial to the Earth’s well-being. The rainforests contains 90-140 billion tons of carbon, which helps stabilise climate.

But the forest is under threat. In 2019, the number of fires in the Brazilian Amazon rose 16 percent. In 2020, deforestation led to the loss of 8,426 square kilometers of the rainforest.

(Image credit: www.worldwildlife.org)

The Congo Basin in Africa covers 500 million acres. It is the world’s second-largest tropical forest.

The basin hosts endangered species of chimpanzees, forest elephants, bonobos, and lowland and mountain gorillas, 10,000 species of tropical plants, 1,000 species of birds and as many as 700 fish species.

(Image credit : www.cepf.net)

The Valdivian Temperate Forests, an ecoregion on South America's Western Coast, cover an area of 2,48,100 square kilometres.

They are distinct for their dense understories of ferns and bamboos. The forests mostly have evergreen angiosperm trees -- trees whose leaves change color and die every fall.

The forests host the world's smallest deer, South America's smallest cat and many species of freshwater fish.

(Image credit: US Department of Agriculture and Forest Service)

Tongass is the United States' largest national forest.

Together with the Chugach National Forest and Glacier Bay National Park, it makes up most of the area under which the ecoregion called the North Pacific Coastal Forests lies.