Nihonkai montane deciduous forests
RESOLVE 671
The Nihonkai montane deciduous forests cover the Sea of Japan (Nihonkai) facing mountain slopes of Honshu, Japan's largest island, stretching some 800 kilometres up its western side from Wakasa Bay, and reach the forested lowland hills at the southern tip of Hokkaido. Deciduous broadleaf woodland dominates, built around Japanese beech (Fagus crenata) alongside katsura, Japanese hornbeam, maple, and lower-elevation oaks such as Mongolian and jolcham oak, with a dense understorey of dwarf bamboo. The climate is strongly seasonal and temperate, with summer highs near 30 degrees Celsius and cold, snowy winters whose daily averages fall to around 3 degrees Celsius. Protected areas blanket nearly a third of the ecoregion, and the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Shirakami-Sanchi safeguards some of East Asia's largest remaining virgin beech forests, home to Japanese serow, Japanese macaque, and Asiatic black bear. For gardeners, several signature ornamentals are native here, including Japanese cherry (Prunus), celebrated in the hanami flower-viewing tradition, as well as maples and the beeches themselves.
About the temperate broadleaf & mixed forests biome
Four-season forests of deciduous hardwoods — oak, maple, beech — often mixed with conifers, shaped by warm summers and cold winters. Trees leaf out in spring and color in autumn; the generally fertile soils have made these forests heavily settled and farmed.
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.