Yapen rain forests

The Yapen rain forests cover Yapen Island and the smaller neighboring islands of Mios Num and Kurudu, which sit in Cenderawasih Bay within Indonesia's Papua Province, just north of the New Guinea mainland. Forests here grade from coastal strand and alluvial flats through hill forest to montane forest on a limestone-and-plutonic spine rising to about 1,430 meters; the shoreline is dominated by trees such as Terminalia catappa, Barringtonia asiatica, Calophyllum inophyllum, and Casuarina, the conifer Araucaria cunninghamii emerges in scattered mountain locations above 500 meters, and the New Guinea kauri Agathis labillardieri is among the ecoregion's trees. The climate is a humid tropical rainforest one, wet through the year with temperatures hovering near 26 degrees Celsius. Recognized as a Centre of Plant Diversity, the ecoregion has yielded recent botanical discoveries including eleven new species of Pandanus and a Begonia, and its fauna includes the northern cassowary as the largest of roughly 147 bird species; the Yapen Tengah Nature Reserve, covering about 590 square kilometers, anchors its protected areas. For gardeners, the native flora includes ornamental genera such as Pandanus, Begonia, and Calophyllum that are familiar in warm, frost-free planting.

Browse other regions in the same biome. Their plant lists can suggest species and combinations worth comparing.

The countries, US states, and Canadian provinces this ecoregion touches, from a spatial join of its RESOLVE polygon against Natural Earth boundaries.