Central Indochina dry forests
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The Central Indochina dry forests form a large tropical dry-forest ecoregion sprawling across the plateaus and low river basins of Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, taking in the Khorat Plateau, the uplands around the Chao Phraya basin, and the foothills of the Tenasserim Range. Its signature habitat is open deciduous dipterocarp woodland, dominated by Dipterocarpus trees that drop their leaves through the dry season above a sparse, grassy understory. The climate is strongly monsoonal, with roughly 1,000 to 1,500 mm of rainfall concentrated in the wet months followed by a long dry season of five to seven months, during which frequent ground fires sweep the undergrowth and help shape the forest. Until the mid-20th century these savanna-like woodlands rivaled East African plains for their herds of large mammals, including Asian elephants, banteng, gaur, and the sambar deer that serves as the ecoregion's flagship species. Conservation pressure is severe: much original forest has been cleared, only a small fraction is protected, and the endemic wild cattle known as the kouprey is now believed to be globally extinct.
About the tropical & subtropical dry broadleaf forests biome
Tropical forests that pass through a pronounced dry season, when many trees drop their leaves to conserve water. They hold high biodiversity but are among the most threatened tropical habitats, sensitive to fire and to clearing for agriculture.
Collections for this ecoregion
No curated collection's plants all fit this ecoregion's zone range. We surface a collection only when every member would grow here — partial fits get filtered out rather than mislead. As the catalog and the curated set both grow, this section will fill in.