Guyana
Guyana the Co-operative Republic of Guyana, is a country on the northern mainland of South America. It is considered part of the Caribbean region because of its strong cultural and political ties with other Anglo-Caribbean countries and the Caribbean Community. Guyana is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the north, Brazil to the south and southwest, Venezuela to the west, Suriname to the east. With an area of 215,000 square kilometres, Guyana is the third-smallest sovereign state on mainland South America after Uruguay and Suriname; the region known as "the Guianas" consists of the large shield landmass north of the Amazon River and east of the Orinoco River known as the "land of many waters". Major rivers in Guyana include the Essequibo, the Berbice, the Demerara. Inhabited by many indigenous groups, Guyana was settled by the Dutch before coming under British control in the late 18th century, it was governed as British Guiana, with a plantation-style economy until the 1950s. It gained independence in 1966, became a republic within the Commonwealth of Nations in 1970.
The legacy of British rule is reflected in the country's political administration and diverse population, which includes Indian, African and multiracial groups. Guyana is the only South American nation; the majority of the population, speak Guyanese Creole, an English-based creole language, as a first language. Guyana is part of the Anglophone Caribbean. CARICOM, of which Guyana is a member, is headquartered in Guyana's capital and largest city, Georgetown. In 2008, the country joined the Union of South American Nations as a founding member; the name "Guyana" derives from Guiana, the original name for the region that included Guyana, French Guiana, parts of Colombia and Brazil. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "Guyana" comes from an indigenous Amerindian language and means "land of many waters". There are nine indigenous tribes residing in Guyana: the Wai Wai, Patamona, Kalina, Pemon and Warao; the Lokono and Kalina tribes dominated Guyana. Although Christopher Columbus was the first European to sight Guyana during his third voyage, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote an account in 1596, the Dutch were the first Europeans to establish colonies: Essequibo and Demerara.
After the British assumed control in 1796, the Dutch formally ceded the area in 1814. In 1831 the three separate colonies became a single British colony known as British Guiana. Since its independence in 1824 Venezuela has claimed the area of land to the west of the Essequibo River. Simón Bolívar wrote to the British government warning against the Berbice and Demerara settlers settling on land which the Venezuelans, as assumed heirs of Spanish claims on the area dating to the sixteenth century, claimed was theirs. In 1899 an international tribunal ruled; the British territorial claim stemmed from Dutch involvement and colonization of the area dating to the sixteenth century, ceded to the British. Guyana achieved independence from the United Kingdom on 26 May 1966 and became a republic on 23 February 1970, remaining a member of the Commonwealth; the US State Department and the US Central Intelligence Agency, along with the British government, played a strong role in influencing political control in Guyana during this time.
The American government supported Forbes Burnham during the early years of independence because Cheddi Jagan was identified as a Marxist. They provided secret financial support and political campaign advice to Burnham's People's National Congress, to the detriment of the Jagan-led People's Progressive Party, supported by Guyanese of East Indian background. In 1978, Guyana received international notice when 918 members of the American cult, Peoples Temple, died in a mass murder/suicide drinking cyanide-laced Flavor Aid. However, most of the suicides were by Americans and not Guyanese. More than 300 children were killed. Jim Jones's bodyguards had earlier attacked people taking off at a small remote airstrip close to Jonestown, killing five people, including Leo Ryan, a US congressman. In May 2008, President Bharrat Jagdeo was a signatory to the UNASUR Constitutive Treaty of the Union of South American Nations. Guyana has ratified the treaty; the territory controlled by Guyana lies between latitudes 1° and 9°N, longitudes 56° and 62°W.
The country can be divided into five natural regions. Some of Guyana's highest mountains are Mount Ayanganna, Monte Caburaí and Mount Roraima on the Brazil-Guyana-Venezuela tripoint border, part of the Pakaraima range. Mount Roraima and Guyana's table-top mountains are said to have been the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel The Lost World. There are many volcanic escarpments and waterfalls, including Kaieteur Falls, believed to be the largest water drop in the world. No
Pará
Pará is a state in northern Brazil traversed by the lower Amazon River. It borders the Brazilian states of Amapá, Maranhão, Mato Grosso and Roraima. To the northwest it borders Suriname; the capital and largest city is Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon at the Atlantic Ocean and the 11th most populous city in the country. Pará is the most populous state of the northern region, with a population of over 7.5 million, being the ninth-most populous state in Brazil. It is the second-largest state of Brazil in area, with 1.2 million km², second only to Amazonas upriver. Its most famous icons are the Amazon Rainforest. Pará produces rubber, tropical hardwoods such as mahogany, minerals such as iron ore and bauxite. A new commodity crop is cultivated in the region of Santarém; every October, Belém receives tens of thousands of tourists for the year's most important religious celebration: the procession of the Círio de Nazaré. Another important attraction of the capital is the Marajó-style ceramics, based on pottery from the extinct Marajó indigenous culture, on an island in the Amazon River.
These designs have gained increased international awareness. Toponym of the word pará has its origin in the Tupi language and means "river-sea"; the state's name comes from the river of the same name. In 1500, the Spanish navigator Vicente Yañez Pinzón was the first European to navigate the mouth of the Amazon River. On 26 August 1542, the Spaniard Francisco de Orellana reached the mouth of the Amazon River, waterway by river from Quito, Ecuador. On 28 October 1637, the Portuguese Pedro Teixeira left Belem and went to Quito: during the expedition, he placed a landmark in the confluence of the Napo and Aguarico, in the current border between Ecuador and Peru, to Portugal, to Brazil, getting the possession of most of the Amazon, including all of the current territory of Pará. Archaeologists divide the ancient inhabitants of prehistory Brazil into groups according to their way of life and tools: hunter-gatherers of the coast and farmers; these groups were subsequently named by European settlers as "Indians".
There are archaeological records proving the human presence in Brazil and the region of Santarém since 3000 BC. Marajó people lived in farmer's houses 3,500 years ago; these people knew ceramics, natural medicinal compounds. Their culture remains in Marajoara pottery, which has peculiar decoration; the period from 500 to 1300 was the height of the Marajoara culture. The region of the Amazon valley, by the Treaty of Tordesillas, was in possession of the Spanish Crown, the Portuguese expeditionaries, with the purpose of consolidating the region as Portuguese territory, founded the Fort of the Nativity in 1616, in what was called Santa Maria de Belém do Grão-Pará; the building was the first of the model on Amazon and the most significant in the Amazon territory until 1660. Despite the construction of fort, the occupation of territory was marked by early Dutch and English incursions in search of spices, hence the need of the Portuguese to fortify the area. In the 17th century, the region, integrated into the captaincy of Maranhão, was prosperous with crops and livestock.
In 1616 the captaincy of Grão-Pará was created, belonging to the Portuguese colonial state of Maranhão. In the same year the state of Grão-Pará and Maranhão transferred capital to Belem and attaching the captaincy of Rio Negro in 1755 by creating the State of Grão-Pará and Rio Negro. In 1751, with the expansion to the west, the colonial state of Grão-Pará, which besides the captaincy of Grão Pará would host the captaincy of São José do Rio Negro. In 1823, the Pará decided to join the independent Brazil, separated during the colonial period, reporting directly to Lisbon. However, political infighting continued; the most important of them, the Cabanagem, decreed the independence of the province of Pará. This was, along with the revolution Farroupilha, Rio Grande do Sul, the only to lift the regency period when the power was taken. Cabanagem was the only revolt led by the popular strata. Cabanagem, a popular and social revolt during the Empire of Brazil, in the Amazon region, was influenced by the French Revolution.
It was due to extreme poverty and disease that devastated the Amazon at the beginning of the period, in the former province of Grão-Pará, which included the current Amazonian states of Pará, Amapá, Roraima and Rondônia. The revolt spread from 1835 until January 1840, due to the process of independence of Brazil, which did not occur in the province due to political irrelevance to which the region was relegated by Prince Regent Pedro I. After independence, the strong Portuguese influence remained stable, giving political irrelevance in this province to the Brazilian central government. Indians and mestizos, all named cabanos, teamed against the Regent Government and rebelled, to increase the importance of the region in Brazil's central government addressing the issue of poverty as one of the reasons. All lived in mud huts. At the bottom of the rebellion, there was a mobilization of the Brazilian Empire against the reactionary forces of the province of Grão-Pará in expelling the insurgents who wanted to keep the region as a Portuguese colo
Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition
The Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition is a 29-volume reference work, an edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. It was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication; some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time. This edition of the encyclopedia, containing 40,000 entries, is now in the public domain, many of its articles have been used as a basis for articles in Wikipedia. However, the outdated nature of some of its content makes its use as a source for modern scholarship problematic; some articles have special value and interest to modern scholars as cultural artifacts of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The 1911 eleventh edition was assembled with the management of American publisher Horace Everett Hooper. Hugh Chisholm, who had edited the previous edition, was appointed editor in chief, with Walter Alison Phillips as his principal assistant editor. Hooper bought the rights to the 25-volume 9th edition and persuaded the British newspaper The Times to issue its reprint, with eleven additional volumes as the tenth edition, published in 1902.
Hooper's association with The Times ceased in 1909, he negotiated with the Cambridge University Press to publish the 29-volume eleventh edition. Though it is perceived as a quintessentially British work, the eleventh edition had substantial American influences, not only in the increased amount of American and Canadian content, but in the efforts made to make it more popular. American marketing methods assisted sales; some 14% of the contributors were from North America, a New York office was established to coordinate their work. The initials of the encyclopedia's contributors appear at the end of selected articles or at the end of a section in the case of longer articles, such as that on China, a key is given in each volume to these initials; some articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time, such as Edmund Gosse, J. B. Bury, Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Muir, Peter Kropotkin, T. H. Huxley, James Hopwood Jeans and William Michael Rossetti. Among the lesser-known contributors were some who would become distinguished, such as Ernest Rutherford and Bertrand Russell.
Many articles were carried over from some with minimal updating. Some of the book-length articles were divided into smaller parts for easier reference, yet others much abridged; the best-known authors contributed only a single article or part of an article. Most of the work was done by British Museum scholars and other scholars; the 1911 edition was the first edition of the encyclopædia to include more than just a handful of female contributors, with 34 women contributing articles to the edition. The eleventh edition introduced a number of changes of the format of the Britannica, it was the first to be published complete, instead of the previous method of volumes being released as they were ready. The print type was subject to continual updating until publication, it was the first edition of Britannica to be issued with a comprehensive index volume in, added a categorical index, where like topics were listed. It was the first not to include long treatise-length articles. Though the overall length of the work was about the same as that of its predecessor, the number of articles had increased from 17,000 to 40,000.
It was the first edition of Britannica to include biographies of living people. Sixteen maps of the famous 9th edition of Stielers Handatlas were translated to English, converted to Imperial units, printed in Gotha, Germany by Justus Perthes and became part this edition. Editions only included Perthes' great maps as low quality reproductions. According to Coleman and Simmons, the content of the encyclopedia was distributed as follows: Hooper sold the rights to Sears Roebuck of Chicago in 1920, completing the Britannica's transition to becoming a American publication. In 1922, an additional three volumes, were published, covering the events of the intervening years, including World War I. These, together with a reprint of the eleventh edition, formed the twelfth edition of the work. A similar thirteenth edition, consisting of three volumes plus a reprint of the twelfth edition, was published in 1926, so the twelfth and thirteenth editions were related to the eleventh edition and shared much of the same content.
However, it became apparent that a more thorough update of the work was required. The fourteenth edition, published in 1929, was revised, with much text eliminated or abridged to make room for new topics; the eleventh edition was the basis of every version of the Encyclopædia Britannica until the new fifteenth edition was published in 1974, using modern information presentation. The eleventh edition's articles are still of value and interest to modern readers and scholars as a cultural artifact: the British Empire was at its maximum, imperialism was unchallenged, much of the world was still ruled by monarchs, the tragedy of the modern world wars was still in the future, they are an invaluable resource for topics omitted from modern encyclopedias for biography and the history of science and technology. As a literary text, the encyclopedia has value as an example of early 20th-century prose. For example, it employs literary devices, such as pathetic fallacy, which are not as common in modern reference texts.
In 1917, using the pseudonym of S. S. Van Dine, the US art critic and author Willard Huntington Wright published Misinforming a Nation, a 200+
Amazon River
The Amazon River in South America is the largest river by discharge volume of water in the world, by some definitions it is the longest. The headwaters of the Apurímac River on Nevado Mismi had been considered for nearly a century as the Amazon's most distant source, until a 2014 study found it to be the headwaters of the Mantaro River on the Cordillera Rumi Cruz in Peru; the Mantaro and Apurímac join, with other tributaries form the Ucayali River, which in turn meets the Marañón River upstream of Iquitos, Peru, to form what countries other than Brazil consider to be the main stem of the Amazon. Brazilians call this section the Solimões River above its confluence with the Rio Negro to form what Brazilians call the Amazon at the Meeting of Waters at Manaus, the river's largest city. At an average discharge of about 209,000 cubic metres per second —approximately 6,591 cubic kilometres per annum, greater than the next seven largest independent rivers combined—the Amazon represents 20% of the global riverine discharge to the ocean.
The Amazon basin is the largest drainage basin in the world, with an area of 7,050,000 square kilometres. The portion of the river's drainage basin in Brazil alone is larger than any other river's basin; the Amazon enters Brazil with only one-fifth of the flow it discharges into the Atlantic Ocean, yet has a greater flow at this point than the discharge of any other river. The river was known by Europeans as the Marañón and the Peruvian part of the river is still known by that name today, it became known as the Rio Amazonas in Spanish and Portuguese, or The Amazon in English. The name Rio Amazonas was given after native warriors attacked a 16th-century expedition by Francisco de Orellana; the warriors were led by women, reminding de Orellana of the Amazon warriors, a tribe of women warriors related to Iranian Scythians and Sarmatians mentioned in Greek mythology. The word Amazon itself may be derived from the Iranian compound *ha-maz-an- " fighting together" or ethnonym *ha-mazan- "warriors", a word attested indirectly through a derivation, a denominal verb in Hesychius of Alexandria's gloss "ἁμαζακάραν· πολεμεῖν.
Πέρσαι", where it appears together with the Indo-Iranian root *kar- "make". During what many archaeologists call the formative stage, Amazonian societies were involved in the emergence of South America's highland agrarian systems; the trade with Andean civilisations in the terrains of the headwaters in the Andes, formed an essential contribution to the social and religious development of the higher altitude civilisations of among others the Muisca and Incas. Early human settlements were based on low-lying hills or mounds. Shell mounds were the earliest evidence of habitation, they are associated with ceramic age cultures. Artificial earth platforms for entire villages are the second type of mounds, they are best represented by the Marajoara culture. Figurative mounds are the most recent types of occupation. There is ample evidence that the areas surrounding the Amazon River were home to complex and large-scale indigenous societies chiefdoms who developed large towns and cities. Archaeologists estimate that by the time the Spanish conquistador De Orellana traveled across the Amazon in 1541, more than 3 million indigenous people lived around the Amazon.
These pre-Columbian settlements created developed civilizations. For instance, pre-Columbian indigenous people on the island of Marajó may have developed social stratification and supported a population of 100,000 people. In order to achieve this level of development, the indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon rainforest altered the forest's ecology by selective cultivation and the use of fire. Scientists argue that by burning areas of the forest repetitiously, the indigenous people caused the soil to become richer in nutrients; this created dark soil areas known as terra preta de índio. Because of the terra preta, indigenous communities were able to make land fertile and thus sustainable for the large-scale agriculture needed to support their large populations and complex social structures. Further research has hypothesized; some say that its effects on forest ecology and regional climate explain the otherwise inexplicable band of lower rainfall through the Amazon basin. Many indigenous tribes engaged in constant warfare.
James Stuart Olson wrote: "The Munduruku expansion dislocated and displaced the Kawahíb, breaking the tribe down into much smaller groups... first came to the attention of Europeans in 1770 when they began a series of widespread attacks on Brazilian settlements along the Amazon River." In March 1500, Spanish conquistador Vicente Yáñez Pinzón was the first documented European to sail up the Amazon River. Pinzón called the stream Río Santa María del Mar Dulce shortened to Mar Dulce sweet sea, because of its fresh water pushing out into the ocean. Another Spanish explorer, Francisco de Orellana, was the first European to travel from the origins of the upstream river basins, situated in the Andes, to the mouth of the river. In this journey, Orellana baptised some of the affluents of the Amazonas like Rio Negro and Jurua; the name Amazonas is taken from the native warriors that attacked this expedition women, that reminded De Orellana of the mythical female Amazon warriors from the
Sunglint
Sunglint is a phenomenon that occurs when sunlight reflects off the surface of the ocean at the same angle that a satellite or other sensor is viewing the surface. In the affected area of the image, smooth ocean water becomes a silvery mirror, while rougher surface waters appear dark. Sometimes the sunglint region of satellite images reveals interesting ocean or atmospheric features that the sensor does not record; as an example of interesting features revealed by sunglint, the accompanying image shows a large, overlapping wave pattern in the sunglint region of an image of Indonesia and Australia. The wave pattern seen in the image is not from large ocean waves, however; the pattern is of atmospheric gravity waves above the surface of the ocean. They form when buoyancy pushes air up, gravity pulls it back down. On its descent into the low-point of the wave, the air touches the surface of the ocean, roughening the water; the long, vertical dark lines show. The brighter regions show the crests of the atmospheric waves.
Beneath the crests, the water reflects light directly back towards the sensor. Clouds form at the crests of the waves, such clouds are visible throughout this scene. Below is a gallery of images. Sun glitter Media related to Category:Sunglint at Wikimedia Commons
Brazil
Brazil the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At 8.5 million square kilometers and with over 208 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area and the fifth most populous. Its capital is Brasília, its most populated city is São Paulo; the federation is composed of the union of the 26 states, the Federal District, the 5,570 municipalities. It is the largest country to have Portuguese as an official language and the only one in the Americas. Bounded by the Atlantic Ocean on the east, Brazil has a coastline of 7,491 kilometers, it borders all other South American countries except Ecuador and Chile and covers 47.3% of the continent's land area. Its Amazon River basin includes a vast tropical forest, home to diverse wildlife, a variety of ecological systems, extensive natural resources spanning numerous protected habitats; this unique environmental heritage makes Brazil one of 17 megadiverse countries, is the subject of significant global interest and debate regarding deforestation and environmental protection.
Brazil was inhabited by numerous tribal nations prior to the landing in 1500 of explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral, who claimed the area for the Portuguese Empire. Brazil remained a Portuguese colony until 1808, when the capital of the empire was transferred from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro. In 1815, the colony was elevated to the rank of kingdom upon the formation of the United Kingdom of Portugal and the Algarves. Independence was achieved in 1822 with the creation of the Empire of Brazil, a unitary state governed under a constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary system; the ratification of the first constitution in 1824 led to the formation of a bicameral legislature, now called the National Congress. The country became a presidential republic in 1889 following a military coup d'état. An authoritarian military junta came to power in 1964 and ruled until 1985, after which civilian governance resumed. Brazil's current constitution, formulated in 1988, defines it as a democratic federal republic. Due to its rich culture and history, the country ranks thirteenth in the world by number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Brazil is considered an advanced emerging economy. It has the ninth largest GDP in the world by nominal, eight and PPP measures, it is one of the world's major breadbaskets, being the largest producer of coffee for the last 150 years. It is classified as an upper-middle income economy by the World Bank and a newly industrialized country, with the largest share of global wealth in Latin America. Brazil is a regional power and sometimes considered a great or a middle power in international affairs. On account of its international recognition and influence, the country is subsequently classified as an emerging power and a potential superpower by several analysts. Brazil is a founding member of the United Nations, the G20, BRICS, Union of South American Nations, Organization of American States, Organization of Ibero-American States and the Community of Portuguese Language Countries, it is that the word "Brazil" comes from the Portuguese word for brazilwood, a tree that once grew plentifully along the Brazilian coast.
In Portuguese, brazilwood is called pau-brasil, with the word brasil given the etymology "red like an ember", formed from brasa and the suffix -il. As brazilwood produces a deep red dye, it was valued by the European textile industry and was the earliest commercially exploited product from Brazil. Throughout the 16th century, massive amounts of brazilwood were harvested by indigenous peoples along the Brazilian coast, who sold the timber to European traders in return for assorted European consumer goods; the official Portuguese name of the land, in original Portuguese records, was the "Land of the Holy Cross", but European sailors and merchants called it the "Land of Brazil" because of the brazilwood trade. The popular appellation eclipsed and supplanted the official Portuguese name; some early sailors called it the "Land of Parrots". In the Guarani language, an official language of Paraguay, Brazil is called "Pindorama"; this was the name the indigenous population gave to the region, meaning "land of the palm trees".
Some of the earliest human remains found in the Americas, Luzia Woman, were found in the area of Pedro Leopoldo, Minas Gerais and provide evidence of human habitation going back at least 11,000 years. The earliest pottery found in the Western Hemisphere was excavated in the Amazon basin of Brazil and radiocarbon dated to 8,000 years ago; the pottery was found near Santarém and provides evidence that the tropical forest region supported a complex prehistoric culture. The Marajoara culture flourished on Marajó in the Amazon delta from 800 CE to 1400 CE, developing sophisticated pottery, social stratification, large populations, mound building, complex social formations such as chiefdoms. Around the time of the Portuguese arrival, the territory of current day Brazil had an estimated indigenous population of 7 million people semi-nomadic who subsisted on hunting, fishing and migrant agriculture; the indigenous population of Brazil comprised several large indigenous ethnic groups. The Tupí people were subdivided into the Tupiniquins and Tupinambás, there were many subdivisions of the other gro
Uatuma-Trombetas moist forests
The Uatuma-Trombetas moist forests is an ecoregion in northwest Brazil in the Amazon biome. It covers the Amazon basin north of the Amazon River from close to the Atlantic Ocean to the Rio Negro west of Manaus; the ecoregion is intact, although it has been damaged along the main rivers and around population centers. The Uatuma-Trombetas moist forests ecoregion is in the north of Brazil in parts of the states of Roraima and Amapá to the north of the Amazon River. Small areas of the ecoregion cross the Brazilian border into Suriname, it has an area of 47,319,082 hectares. The ecoregion covers the area to the north of the Amazon River from close to the Atlantic coast to the Rio Negro and the Branco River. In the north to extends to the mountains along the border between Brazil and the Guianas and Suriname. On the 1993 Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics map the Brazilian part is shown as "lowland ombrophilous dense forests", "submontane ombrophilous dense forests" and "ombrophilous forest – savanna transition".
The Uatuma-Trombetas moist forests ecoregion is bounded to the south by the Monte Alegre várzea, Gurupa várzea and Marajó várzea ecoregions along the Amazon River. It adjoins sections of the Guianan savanna ecoregion to the east and north, but most of the northern border adjoins the Guianan moist forests ecoregion. In the northwest it adjoins a section of the Guayanan Highlands moist forests ecoregion; the western part of the Uatuma-Trombetas ecoregion contains large areas of Rio Negro campinarana. To the west it adjoins Guianan piedmont and lowland moist forests, Negro-Branco moist forests and Japurá-Solimões-Negro moist forests; the north of the ecoregion reaches into the quartzite or sandstone upland terraces and mountains of the ancient Guiana Shield, while the south is in the much newer sedimentary basin of the Amazon River, formed during the recent Tertiary period. It contains high plains, rolling hills and lowlands, with diverse fauna and flora in the different habitats. Soils are kaolinite, or sandy podzols on the slopes, are low in nutrients, but some areas have fertile clay loam soils.
The ecoregion is crossed by various blackwater or clearwater rivers, including the Trombetas, Uatumã, Curuapanema and Araguari.. The Uatuma-Trombetas moist forests ecoregion is in the neotropic ecozone and the tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests biome; the Köppen climate classification is "Am": monsoonal. Mean monthly temperatures are 26 to 27 °C. Rainfall is seasonal. Average annual rainfall ranges from 1,700 millimetres in the east to 3,000 millimetres in the west; the ecoregion contains lowland flooded forests along tributaries of the Amazon, seasonally dry forests and meadows on the Guiana Shield. The larger part of the ecoregion is covered by humid rainforest with a canopy 30 to 40 metres high and emergent trees reaching 50 metres. There are areas of seasonal forest east of Óbidos, dry in the summer and has a canopy under 20 metres, with mesophyllous and xeromorphic flora. There are some open meadows. In the west, Manaus may be a region where organisms that had separated and evolved independently during ice ages came back together in warmer periods.
The forests to the north and east of Manaus are among the most diverse in the world, include many endemic plants and insects. To the north of Manaus there are as many as 235 species of trees in one hectare. Common tree species include Protium hebetatum, Eschweilera coriacea, Eschweilera wachenheimii, Manilkara bidentata, Rinorea guianensis, Pouteria engleri, Swartzia reticulata, Duckeodendron cestroides, Qualea labouriauara. To the west of the Trombetas the forest has a canopy from 20 to 30 metres with emergent trees reaching 40 metres; the dense vegetation has many small-to-medium diameter trees, under 600 millimetres wide. The most common families of trees are Sapotaceae, Burseraceae, Rubiaceae, Lauraceae, Moraceae and Caesalpinioideae; the forests are more homogeneous in structure east of the Trombetas River, have but similar height and species. The Brazil nut and Dinizia excelsa do not reach the same size as elsewhere; the forests do not have large numbers of epiphytes. The acapú is an important timber tree, endemic to the east of the ecoregion.
The dry hills to the north of Óbidos hold plants such as Zamia lecointei, Cynometra longifolia, Tachigalia grandiflora, Swartzia duckei, Ormosia cuneata, Peltogyne paradoxa, Cusparia trombetensis, Vochysia mapuerae, Bonnetia dinizii, Lacunaria sampaioi, Lophostoma dinizii, Ctenardisia speciosa, Mostuea brasiliensis, Macairea viscosa, Buchenavia corrugata, Ferdinandusa cordata, Pouteria speciosa and Lepidocordia punctata. 175 species of mammals have been reported of. Primates include red-faced spider monkey, pied tamarin, black bearded saki, Venezuelan red howler and red-handed tamarin. Other mammals include jaguar, anteaters and many rodents. Endangered mammals include the black bearded saki, pied tamarin and giant otter.42 frog species have been recorded around Manaus including the Surinam horned frog and tree frogs. 62 snake species have been recorded including the common lancehead and boa constrictor. 23 species of lizards include the green iguana (Iguana iguan
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Amazon § The Trombetas". Encyclopædia Britannica. 1 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 787.