Northern New Guinea montane rain forests
RESOLVE 149
The Northern New Guinea montane rain forests cloak a scattered chain of coastal mountain ranges in northern New Guinea, spanning both Indonesia and Papua New Guinea across the Van Rees, Foya (Gauttier), Cyclops, Bewani, Torricelli, Prince Alexander, and Adelbert ranges, which lie north of the island's Central Range. Above about 1,000 meters, a dense montane rain forest canopy is built from broadleaf trees such as Nothofagus (southern beech), Lithocarpus, Castanopsis, Syzygium, and Ilex, alongside the Lauraceae and Myrtaceae families, while ancient southern conifers like Dacrycarpus, Podocarpus, Phyllocladus, and Papuacedrus take over at higher, cooler elevations. The climate is wet and tropical, typical of montane Melanesia in the western Pacific. Long isolated as former islands that fused onto the mainland, these ranges harbor remarkable endemic wildlife, including Scott's tree kangaroo, long-beaked echidnas, and several bowerbirds such as the fire-maned and golden-fronted bowerbird, though much of the ecoregion remains unprotected and threatened by logging and agricultural clearing.
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.
Currently suited · 4
These plants fit the ecoregion as it is today, but the mid-century projection moves them outside their stated zone range — plan for them to struggle by 2070.
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.