Chocó-Darién moist forests
RESOLVE 454
The Chocó-Darién moist forests stretch from eastern Panama, in the Darién and Guna Yala regions, down almost the entire Pacific coast of Colombia through the departments of Chocó, Valle del Cauca, Cauca, and Nariño, where they grade southward into the Western Ecuador moist forests. These dense lowland rainforests are layered with lianas and epiphytes and dominated by trees such as bongo (Cavanillesia), wild cashew (Anacardium excelsum), rubber (Hevea), and kapok (Ceiba), with cativo (Prioria copaifera) common in flooded ground. The climate is equatorial and consistently wet, averaging about 23.6°C with annual rainfall of roughly 4,000 to 9,000 millimetres, among the highest on Earth. It ranks among the world's richest centers of endemism, holding at least 8,000 vascular plant species with close to a fifth found nowhere else, and is a recognized global biodiversity hotspot whose flagship is the Critically Endangered brown-headed spider monkey, though logging, mining, and agriculture continue to press on the forest. Gardeners will recognize native aroids of family Araceae from this region, including Anthurium, Monstera, and Philodendron.
About the tropical & subtropical moist broadleaf forests biome
Warm, wet, highly productive forests — including tropical rainforests — with closed canopies, near year-round growing seasons, and the richest terrestrial biodiversity on Earth. Low seasonality and high rainfall sustain dense, layered vegetation from canopy to forest floor.
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.