Kwazulu Natal-Cape coastal forests
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The KwaZulu Natal-Cape coastal forests, also mapped as the KwaZulu-Cape coastal forest mosaic, run along South Africa's eastern coastline through the KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces, occupying the humid strip between the Indian Ocean and the foothills of the Drakensberg from the St. Lucia estuary south to Cape St. Francis. Rather than a single forest type, it is a mosaic of dune, swamp, riverine, sand, coastal lowland, and scarp forest interwoven with grasslands, palm woodlands, and thorn scrublands, with characteristic trees including Millettia grandis, Protorhus longifolia, and Dalbergia obovata inland and Mimusops caffra and Euclea natalensis on the dunes. The climate is seasonally moist and subtropical, with summer rainfall in the north grading to winter rainfall in the south. This narrow coastal belt is botanically rich, supporting roughly 3,000 plant species of which about 40 percent of the larger woody species are endemic, and it harbors the endemic genus Rhynchocalyx along with its vulnerable flagship, the Ngoye cycad.
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.