No rain forest term?

[turbomam]

"rain forest" is in one of the ROBOT-style Google Sheets that I've been asked to review and execute. The proposed definition is

A forest ecosystem which has tall and mostly evergreen trees characterized by a closed and continuous tree canopy and a high amount of annual rainfall

I think this is an example of a term that appears in the annotation of a environmental biosample in GOLD

The only place I currently see 'rain.?forest' in EnvO is tropical lowland evergreen broadleaf rain forest

I have browsed the ENVO:01001243 forest ecosystem branch of EnvO and see that the hierarchy is largely based on

• the predominant type of leaves observed in a forest
• the prevailing climate
• the continuity of the canopy, etc.

I just don't have enough knowledge about this domain to tell if I can place a new 'rain forest' as a subclass of any existing term that's more specific than "forest ecosystem".

[cmungall]

Possible duplicate with #1174.

[kaiiam]

@turbomam as Chris said see #1174 and #805. I'm also not an expert on that subject but my intuition would be to make is SC to forest ecosystem but many of those hierarchies could benefit from some cleanup like discussed in #1051. Not sure what the best way to proceed would be long term. Short term I'd suggest making it SC to forest ecosystem.

[turbomam]

Thank guys I really appreciate the responses and will forge ahead with SC of forest ecosystem

[cmungall]

The new term should be "rainforest biome", placed under "biome", with an exact synonym "rainforest".

If in future we need a more general "rainforest ecosystem" we can add that (I do not understand how to tell the difference but this has been said on other issues)

Adding only "rainforest ecosystem" but not "rainforest biome" will be confusing, because people will be rightly surprised by the lack of rainforest terms under "biome" (#1549).