Vogelkop-Aru lowland rain forests
RESOLVE 161
The Vogelkop-Aru lowland rain forests blanket the lowlands of western New Guinea in Indonesia, wrapping the Bird's Head (Vogelkop) and Bomberai peninsulas, the Bird's Neck isthmus, the Aru Islands, and the Raja Ampat group, including Misool, Salawati, and Waigeo. These are tropical wet evergreen forests, ranging from alluvial and hill stands to scattered limestone forest, built around genera such as Pometia, Ficus, Terminalia, Octomeles, Alstonia, Syzygium, Artocarpus, and Canarium, with the conifer Araucaria cunninghamii forming dense groves in places. The climate is consistently warm and humid, with temperatures averaging around 27 degrees Celsius and annual rainfall exceeding 2,700 millimeters, concentrated in the late-summer months. Considered among the largest and most intact lowland rainforests of the Australasian realm, the ecoregion is exceptionally rich in birds, with the twelve-wired bird of paradise as its flagship species and nine bird species found nowhere else; roughly ten percent of its area lies within protected reserves. For warm-climate gardeners, several natives double as familiar ornamentals or fruiting trees, including figs (Ficus), Syzygium, jackfruit relatives (Artocarpus), and the hoop pine (Araucaria cunninghamii).
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
No catalog plants intersect this ecoregion's zone range. As the catalog grows to cover this region's climate band, suggestions will surface here.
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.