Temperate Rainforests
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
40 free Temperate Rainforests trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Temperate rainforests are among the rarest forests on Earth. They grow only where cool, mild air meets a great deal of water, usually on a strip of land squeezed between an ocean and a mountain range. The result is a world of enormous evergreens, branches upholstered in green, and a forest floor that almost never dries out. This quiz turns fun facts about temperate rainforests into questions. It covers where these forests grow and why, the record-setting trees and the strange ways they find food and water, the animals that live beneath them, and the films, legends, protests and people the forests have drawn in. It suits students working on a biome project, teachers who want a ready-made review, and anyone who has stood under a very tall tree and wondered about it. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so each question leaves you with a fact worth repeating.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which white-furred animal of Canada's coastal rainforest is the official mammal of British Columbia?
Kermode bear
Kermode bear, or spirit bear, is a black bear whose white coat comes from a recessive gene, so dark parents can carry it unseen. By day the white ones catch more salmon than black ones do.
Q 02A small red stone in Olympic National Park's Hoh Rainforest marks one square inch set aside to protect what?
Silence
Silence is the goal: sound recordist Gordon Hempton placed the stone in 2005, and the spot has been called the quietest place in the United States.
Q 03Rare albino redwoods in California have ghost-white needles because they cannot produce which pigment?
Chlorophyll
Chlorophyll is what lets a plant feed itself, so an albino redwood lives only by taking sugar through its roots from a normal tree, usually its parent. About 400 are known.
Q 04Which legendary ape-like creature was supposedly filmed in California's Six Rivers National Forest in 1967?
Bigfoot
Bigfoot is also called Sasquatch, a name about thirty years older. In 1958 a bulldozer operator had found 16-inch footprints in the same national forest.
Q 05Which film franchise shot a 1997 sequel in Fern Canyon, a fern-walled ravine among California's redwoods?
Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park's sequel The Lost World began filming in the canyon. The makers chose redwood country because research suggested dinosaurs lived in forests like it, not in the tropics.
Q 06The bark of the Pacific yew, a small understory tree of Northwest rainforests, first yielded a drug for which disease?
Cancer
Cancer of the breast, ovary and lung is treated with paclitaxel, or Taxol, first isolated from the bark. The yew was growing scarce before chemists found a way to make the drug from cultivated trees.
Q 07Which country's Franz Josef and Fox glaciers end in valleys they share with temperate rainforest?
New Zealand
New Zealand's Franz Josef Glacier is so steep that it drops from snowfields above 2,500 metres to about 300 metres above the sea in just 11 km, ending among rainforest trees.
Q 08Which amphibians are so diverse in Great Smoky Mountains National Park that it is called their 'Capital of the World'?
Salamanders
Salamanders of about 30 species live in the Smokies, part of the rain-soaked southern Appalachians, where the wettest high forests count as temperate rainforest. The red-cheeked kind lives nowhere else.
Q 09Southern beech, a mainstay of Patagonian and Australasian rainforests, has left fossils on which other landmass?
Antarctica
Antarctica was once joined to Australia and other southern lands in the supercontinent Gondwana, which may be how the trees came to be scattered around the southern Pacific.
Q 10Which predators of British Columbia's coastal rainforest swim between islands and take most of their food from the sea?
Wolves
Wolves on this coast swim as far as 12 km between islands and get 75 to 90 percent of their diet from the ocean, including seals, otters and the heads of salmon.
Q 11Which US president gives his name to the elk of Olympic National Park's rainforests, the largest-bodied elk subspecies?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt had the elk named after him by a naturalist friend. Wanting to protect the herds was a main reason he declared Mount Olympus a national monument in 1909.
Q 12Which US state, nicknamed the Evergreen State, holds the Hoh Rainforest on its Olympic Peninsula?
Washington
Washington's Hoh valley receives an average of 140 inches of precipitation a year, which is close to 12 feet of water falling on its mossy forest.
Q 13Which US state holds the Tongass, the country's largest national forest and a vast stretch of temperate rainforest?
Alaska
Q 21Which term, from the Greek for 'upon plant', covers the mosses and ferns that live harmlessly on rainforest branches?
Epiphytes
Epiphytes take their water and nutrients from rain, air and trapped debris, and use the tree only as a perch. That is what separates them from true parasitic plants.
Q 22Which effect leaves the town of Sequim, just north of the sodden Olympic Mountains, about as dry as Los Angeles?
Rain shadow
Rain shadow forms because Pacific storms drop their moisture on the mountains' windward slopes, feeding the rainforests, and reach Sequim nearly wrung dry: under 16 inches falls there a year.
Q 23Which continent holds the largest area of temperate rainforest on Earth, along the mountains of its Pacific coast?
North America
Alaska's Tongass covers 16.7 million acres of the state's southeastern panhandle, an expanse larger than ten whole US states.
Q 14Which tree, called the Tree of Life by many Northwest Coast First Nations, is the usual wood of totem poles?
Western red cedar
Western red cedar logs were towed whole to the village before carving. The same tree gave coastal peoples canoes, house boards, watertight baskets and clothing.
Q 15Which organisms link tree roots into the underground networks studied by Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard?
Fungi
Fungi wrap around roots and move nutrients between trees. Simard found that the biggest old 'mother trees' act as hubs of the network and help feed nearby seedlings.
Q 16Which nickname is given to the recurring atmospheric river that drenches the west coast of the United States and Canada?
Pineapple Express
Pineapple Express storms are narrow corridors of water vapour that reach from the waters near Hawaii to any point on the continent's western shore, bringing heavy rain.
Q 17Which Australian state holds the Tarkine, the country's largest remaining single tract of temperate rainforest?
Tasmania
Tasmania's Tarkine holds cool, wet forest of a kind inherited from the ancient supercontinent Gondwana, alongside relics of the island's early mining days.
Q 18Which country's rainforest holds Gran Abuelo, an alerce tree that may be more than 5,000 years old?
Chile
Chile's Great-Grandfather tree showed about 2,400 rings in the part of the trunk a borer could reach, so its full age is a model's estimate that would rival the oldest bristlecone pines.
Q 19Which source of moisture, absorbed straight through the needles, helps California's redwoods through dry months?
Ocean fog
Ocean fog can supply about 30% of the water a redwood uses in a year, dripping to the soil and seeping into the leaves. The tallest trees grow where it rolls in most often.
Q 20Which name is given to a fallen, decaying trunk on which rainforest seedlings take root, safe from soil diseases?
Nurse log
Nurse log is the term because the rotting wood feeds and waters young trees like a nursery: moss on the bark holds moisture, and the perch keeps seedlings away from pathogens in the soil.
North America's belt of coastal rainforest runs from Kodiak Island south to the redwoods of northern California. The second largest lies on the far side of the equator, beside the Andes.
Q 24The best sites in Pacific temperate rainforests hold at least four times as much of what as any tropical forest?
Biomass
Biomass, the sheer weight of living matter, piles up here because many of the world's largest and tallest tree species grow side by side in these forests.
Q 25Which nutrient, traced from salmon carcasses into spruce needles 500 metres from streams, feeds Pacific coastal forests?
Nitrogen
Nitrogen from the ocean reaches the trees because predators leave up to half the salmon they catch on the forest floor, providing as much as 24% of the supply in streamside woods.
Q 26Which town, once capital of Russia's Pacific colony, gives its name to the world's largest species of spruce?
Sitka
Sitka spruce can grow to just over 100 metres, among the tallest trees on Earth, even though its shallow roots spread through wet, poorly drained soil.
Q 27Delegates drafting the charter of which organisation held a memorial among the redwoods of Muir Woods in 1945?
United Nations
United Nations delegates from 50 countries, meeting in nearby San Francisco, gathered in Cathedral Grove to honour the US president who had died days before he was due to open the conference.
Q 28Which large mammals of South Africa's Knysna forest, a temperate rainforest, had dwindled to a lone female by 2019?
Elephants
Elephants once sheltered in the Knysna forest in herds thought to number about 1,000, and the survivors became the only unfenced ones left in the country.
Q 29Which tree dominates the 'Celtic rainforest' of western Britain and Ireland, including Dartmoor's mossy Wistman's Wood?
Oak
Oak woods like Wistman's, whose name is said to come from a Devon dialect word for eerie, are small fragments of the rainforest that once covered much of Ireland and the west coast of Great Britain.
Q 30Old man's beard, which hangs from rainforest branches and thrives only in clean air, is what kind of organism?
Lichen
Lichen of this kind, also called beard moss, is so sensitive to dirty air that it serves as a living gauge of air quality. Birds gather it as nesting material.