The Marañón dry forests stretch along the upper valley of the Marañón River and its tributaries in northwestern Peru, threaded between the central and northern Andes at elevations from roughly 500 to 2,000 meters. The habitat is seasonally dry tropical deciduous forest mixed with arid and riparian scrub, where Ceiba grows alongside Acacia and Prosopis, cacti dot the herbaceous scrub, and Salix and Schinus line the watercourses. Its dryness comes from a rain shadow cast by the mountains to the east, which wrings moisture from the air before it reaches the valley. The forests are notably rich for an inter-Andean valley, supporting some 184 woody plant species, and they form a recognized Endemic Bird Area with 22 restricted-range birds, eleven of them found nowhere else, including the flagship yellow-faced parrotlet. Long worn down by farming, cattle ranching, and logging, the ecoregion now faces added pressure from proposed hydroelectric and irrigation dams.

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