The Eastern Cordillera Real montane forests cloak the eastern slopes of the Andes in southern Colombia, Ecuador, and northern Peru, forming an almost continuous band roughly 1,500 kilometres long that is often no more than 30 kilometres wide. Vegetation is tropical evergreen broadleaf forest whose composition shifts dramatically with altitude, rising from closed-canopy montane forest into cloud forest and finally stunted elfin woodland near the heights, and it includes native podocarp conifers such as Podocarpus and Prumnopitys. The climate is wet and mild, with annual precipitation generally between 1,500 and 2,000 millimetres (occasionally reaching far higher) across elevations from about 900 to over 2,100 metres. Botanically it is exceptionally rich, once thought to hold tens of thousands of plant species, and serves as the flagship home of the recently described olinguito, though much of the original wet forest has been cleared for subsistence agriculture, leaving the region rated as vulnerable.

At a glance

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.

Catalog plants suited to this ecoregion

Computed from each plant's stated USDA zone range against this ecoregion's CHELSA-derived current zone range, with the CHELSA mid-century warming delta applied for the projection. Plants whose stated range falls outside both the current and projected zone end up dropped; the rest land in one of the three buckets below.

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.

Related ecoregions