Afrotropical realm

South of the Sahara, two belts of tropical grassland and savanna run east and west across the continent, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ethiopian Highlands.

Immediately south of the Sahara lies the Sahel belt, a transitional zone of semi-arid short grassland and vachellia savanna.

The Sudanian Savanna is home to two great flooded grasslands: the Sudd wetland in South Sudan, and the Niger Inland Delta in Mali.

A belt of tropical moist broadleaf forest also runs along the Indian Ocean coast, from southern Somalia to South Africa.

Thorny, dry-season deciduous species of Vachellia and Senegalia (formerly Acacia) and Commiphora are the dominant trees, growing in open-canopied woodlands, open savannas, dense bushlands, and thickets.

[2] The Afromontane region extends from the Ethiopian Highlands to the Drakensberg Mountains of South Africa, including the East African Rift.

It extends from east to west in a broad belt across the continent, south of the rainforests of the Guineo-Congolian region, and north of the deserts of southeastern Africa, the countries are Malawi, Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, and the subtropical.

A semi-desert natural region, the Karoo desert spans across parts of the Western and Eastern Cape in South Africa and contains vast open spaces and unique vegetation, such as certain species of Asteraceae flowering plants.

Madagascar contains various plant habitats, from rainforests to mountains and deserts, as its biodiversity and ratio of endemism are extremely high.

The East African Great Lakes (Victoria, Malawi, and Tanganyika) are the center of biodiversity of many freshwater fishes, especially cichlids (they harbor more than two-thirds of the estimated 2,000 species in the family).

Africa has three endemic orders of mammals, the Tubulidentata (aardvarks), Afrosoricida (tenrecs and golden moles), and Macroscelidea (elephant shrews).

Tropical African forest is 18 percent of the world's total and covers over 3.6 million square kilometers of land in West, East, and Central Africa.

[7] In West Africa, a chain of rain forests up to 350 km long extends from the eastern border of Sierra Leone to Ghana.

The rain forest of West Africa continues from east of Benin through southern Nigeria and officially ends at the border of Cameroon along the Sanaga river.

Rainforests such as these are the richest, oldest, most prolific, and most complex systems on Earth, are dying, and in turn, are upsetting the delicate ecological balance.

This may disturb global hydrological cycles, release vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and lessen the planet's ability to store excess carbon.

Then, the evergreen or the semi-evergreen rainforest climatically adapted to somewhat more humid conditions than the semi-deciduous type and is usually there in areas where the dry period is shorter than two months.

This forest is usually richer in legumes and a variety of species and its maximum development is around the Bight of Biafra, from Eastern Nigeria to Gabon, and with some large patches leaning to the west from Ghana to Liberia and to the east of Zaïre-Congo basin.

A lack of dependable data and survey information in some countries has made change in areas of unbroken forest difficult to ascertain.

West African countries depend on products like gum, copal, rubber, cola nuts, and palm oil as a source of steady income.

[7] Economic growth and growing environmental protection in industrialized European countries caused increased demand for tropical hardwood from West Africa.

In the first half of the 1980s, an annual forest loss of 7,200 km2 (2,800 sq mi) was noted down along the Gulf of Guinea, a figure equivalent to 4-5 percent of the total remaining rainforest area.

West Africa was prone to selective harvesting practices; while conservationists blamed the timber industry and the farmers for felling trees, others believe rainforest destruction is connected to the problem of fuel wood.

In Guinea, Liberia, and the Ivory Coast, there is almost no primary forest cover left unscathed; in Ghana, the situation is much worse, and nearly all of the rainforest is being removed.

Extrapolating from present rates of loss, botanist Peter Raven pictures that the majority of the world's moderate and smaller rainforests (such as in Africa) could be destroyed in forty years.

By comparison with rainforests in other places of the world in 1973, Africa showed the greatest infringement though in total volume means, African timber production accounted for just one-third compared to that of Asia.

In early 2007, scientists created an entirely new proxy to determine the annual mean air temperature on land—based on molecules from the cell membrane of soil-inhabiting bacteria.

Scientists from the NIOZ, Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research conducted a temperature record dating back to 25,000 years ago.

[9] In concordance with their German colleagues at the University of Bremen, this detailed record shows the history of land temperatures based on the molecular fossils of soil bacteria.

Lead author Johan Weijers and his colleagues concluded that the land-sea temperature difference has by far the largest influence on continental rainfall.