Gallery forests are evergreen

Evergreen

In botany, an evergreen plant is a plant that has leaves in all seasons. This contrasts with deciduous plants, which completely lose their foliage during the winter or dry season.There are many different kinds of evergreen plants, both trees and shrubs...

 forest

Forest

A forest, also referred to as a wood or the woods, is an area with a high density of trees. As with cities, depending where you are in the world, what is considered a forest may vary significantly in size and have various classification according to how and what of the forest is composed...

s that form as corridors along rivers or wetlands and project into landscapes that are otherwise only sparsely treed such as savanna

Savanna

A savanna, or savannah, is a grassland ecosystem characterized by the trees being sufficiently small or widely spaced so that the canopy does not close. The open canopy allows sufficient light to reach the ground to support an unbroken herbaceous layer consisting primarily of C4 grasses.Some...

s, grassland

Grassland

Grasslands are areas where the vegetation is dominated by grasses and other herbaceous plants . However, sedge and rush families can also be found. Grasslands occur naturally on all continents except Antarctica...

s or desert

Desert

A desert is a landscape or region that receives an extremely low amount of precipitation, less than enough to support growth of most plants. Most deserts have an average annual precipitation of less than...

s.

Gallery forests are able to exist where the surrounding landscape does not support forests for a number of reasons. The riparian zones in which they grow offer greater protection from fire which would kill tree seedlings In addition, the alluvial soils of the gallery habitat are often of higher fertility and better drainage than the soils of the surrounding landscape and have a more reliable water supply at depth. As a result, the boundary between gallery forest and the surrounding woodland or grassland is usually abrupt, with the ecotone

Ecotone

An ecotone is a transition area between two biomes but different patches of the landscape, such as forest and grassland. It may be narrow or wide, and it may be local or regional...

 being only a few metres wide,

Gallery forests have shrunk in extent worldwide as a result of human activities, including domestic livestock's preventing tree seedling establishment and the construction of dams and weirs causing flooding or interfering with natural stream flow. In addition to these disturbances, gallery forests are also threatened by many of the same processes that threaten savannas.

See also

• Forest-savanna mosaic
  Forest-savanna mosaic
  Forest-savanna mosaic is an transitory ecotone between the tropical moist broadleaf forests of Equatorial Africa and the drier savannas and open woodlands to the north and south of the forest belt...
  
  
• Bosque
  Bosque
  Bosque is the name for areas of gallery forest found along the riparian flood plains of stream and river banks in the southwestern United States...
  
  
• Riparian forest
  Riparian forest
  A riparian forest is a forested area of land adjacent to a body of water such as a river, stream, pond, lake, marshland, estuary, canal, sink or reservoir. -Etymology:...
  
  
• Riparian zone restoration
  Riparian zone restoration
  Riparian zone restoration is the ecological restoration of riparian zone habitats of streams, rivers, springs, lakes, floodplains, and other hydrologic ecologies.Riparian zones have been degraded throughout much of the world...