Definition: Open shrubland and savanna in the north of Brazil and in Colombia and Venezuela, with low, sparse vegetation growing on sandy soils mostly within terra firme land in the Amazon. It can be of the ‘forested’ type, similar to a gallery forest, ‘wooded’ where the trees are shorter, and finally ‘grassy-woody’, where it occurs in wet plains near rivers and lakes. Amongst the more frequent plant families are the Arecaceae, Bromeliaceae, Clusiaceae, Humiriaceae, Marantaceae, Meliaceae and Rapateaceae.
Definition: A savanna biome is a woodland biome which has seasonal water availability and includes, across its entire spatial extent, trees spaced sufficiently far apart to allow an unbroken layer of grass, sedge (Cyperaceae) or rush (Juncaceae) communities to live.
Definition: An area that is inundated or saturated by surface or ground water at a frequency and duration sufficient to support, and that under normal circumstances do support, a prevalence of vegetation typically adapted for life in saturated soil conditions.
Definition: Of plant duration, a plant whose life span ends within one year after germination, e.g. a winter annual germinating in the autumn and flowering in the spring (esp. in Mediterranean climates), approximately synonymous to therophyte, c.f. biennial, ephemeral, perennial, c.f. also of flowering with respect to architecture, hapaxanthic, monocarpic, pleonanthic.
