Madagascar humid forests
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The Madagascar humid forests, also called the Madagascar lowland forests, stretch along the eastern side of Madagascar in the Afrotropic realm, running from the narrow coastal plain up the eastern escarpment, from the Marojejy massif in the north to the island's southeast corner. These are dense evergreen rainforests whose canopy is built from genera such as Dalbergia, Diospyros, Ocotea, Symphonia, and Tambourissa, with emergent Canarium and Albizia, plus a rich understory of Pandanus, palms, bamboo, and epiphytic orchids. Oceanic trade winds keep the climate warm and humid year-round, delivering rainfall well above 2,000 mm annually and reaching as much as 6,000 mm on the Masoala Peninsula, with a dry season of under two months. The flora and fauna are exceptionally endemic, on the order of 80 to 90 percent, and roughly 97 percent of Malagasy palm species are found nowhere else on Earth, though the forests today are heavily fragmented and degraded. For gardeners, several horticulturally familiar groups are native here, including screw pines (Pandanus), an exceptional diversity of palms, and showy epiphytic orchids such as Darwin's orchid.
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.