Country

Heard Island and McDonald Islands: one ecoregion. Each with its climate now and toward 2050, and its conservation tier.

Heard Island and McDonald Islands belong to a single ecoregion, the Southern Indian Ocean Islands tundra, the system that gathers the remote subantarctic islands of that ocean. Tundra in the Antarctic realm, and ranked Half Protected, it is a vegetation of mosses, cushion plants, tussock grasses, and other low, wind-flattened species; there are no trees and no shrubland, and glaciers cover much of Heard Island itself. These uninhabited islands have no gardens and never will, but as a reference point they mark one end of the planting spectrum: the cold, windy, oceanic extreme where only the toughest cushion- and mat-forming plants persist, the same growth forms gardeners borrow for exposed alpine and coastal plantings elsewhere.