San Félix-San Ambrosio Islands temperate forests

The Juan Fernández Islands temperate forests cover a small Chilean archipelago in the southeastern Pacific roughly 665 kilometers off the mainland, made up of Robinson Crusoe, Alejandro Selkirk, and Santa Clara islands. Vegetation grades by elevation from grassy lower slopes into tall forests, with lowland stands dominated by the endemic trees Drimys confertifolia and Myrceugenia, while tree ferns such as Dicksonia and Thyrsopteris and the endangered chonta palm (Juania australis) occur on the islands. The climate is subtropical, moderated by the cold Humboldt Current and southeast trade winds that bring higher rainfall in winter and drier summers. These isolated forests carry an exceptionally high level of endemic vascular plants, including the endemic plant family Lactoridaceae, and host the Juan Fernández firecrown, the only hummingbird endemic to an oceanic island. The archipelago is protected as a national park and World Biosphere Reserve, yet more than half of its endemic plants are threatened, chiefly by introduced goats and rabbits.

The Magellanic subpolar forests cloak the flanks of the southern Andes and adjacent lowlands of southernmost South America, spanning southern Chile and Argentina out to the Tierra del Fuego archipelago and holding the world's southernmost forests. Southern beeches of the genus Nothofagus dominate, with evergreen Magellan's beech (Nothofagus betuloides) to the wetter west giving way to deciduous lenga (N. pumilio) and nire (N. antarctica) toward the east, alongside Drimys winteri and the conifer Pilgerodendron uviferum. The climate is cold and wet, shaped by strong westerly winds that bend exposed trees into distinctive flag forms, with rainfall falling sharply from the western slopes to the drier eastern margin. The region shelters notable wildlife including the southern pudu, the world's smallest deer, and the Chilean huemul, while the introduced North American beaver remains a significant invasive threat. For gardeners, the native Drimys winteri, known as Winter's bark, is grown ornamentally for its aromatic evergreen foliage.

The Valdivian temperate forests stretch down the southern cone of South America, occupying a narrow strip in Chile and Argentina between the western slope of the Andes and the Pacific Ocean. They are dominated by evergreen southern beeches of the genus Nothofagus alongside long-lived conifers, including the alerce (Fitzroya cupressoides) and the monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana), over a dense understory of Chusquea bamboos, ferns, and the giant-leaved Gunnera tinctoria. The climate is shaped by the prevailing westerlies, and orographic rainfall climbs from around 1,000 mm a year at the northern edge to more than 6,000 mm in the south. These are the only temperate rainforests in South America, where the alerce ranks among the tallest and longest-lived trees on the continent and roughly half of the woody plant species are found nowhere else. Gardeners may recognize Chile's national flower, the climbing copihue (Lapageria rosea), as a native of these forests.

The Allegheny Highlands forests stretch across the Allegheny Plateau of Pennsylvania and New York, a hilly landscape of deeply cut river valleys, waterfalls, and-in the glaciated New York portion-the Finger Lakes. Under a cold temperate climate, pre-settlement forests were dominated by hemlock-white pine-northern hardwoods, with eastern hemlock and beech most abundant alongside sugar maple, red maple, birch, white ash, and black cherry. Eastern hemlock, the ecoregion's flagship species, is now declining across much of the region due to the introduced hemlock woolly adelgid, while over-abundant white-tailed deer suppress forest regeneration.

The Mixed Mesophytic - the most species-diverse temperate hardwood forest in North America - covers the Cumberland Plateau and adjacent unglaciated dissected uplands of West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, southern Ohio, southwestern Virginia, and eastern Tennessee. Sugar maple, American beech, tulip poplar, yellow buckeye, basswood, and white ash share cove-forest canopies with more than two dozen co-dominant species - a richness inherited from being ice-sheet-free during the Pleistocene.

The Blue Ridge province - the eastern spine of the southern Appalachians from southern Pennsylvania through northern Georgia. Cove hardwoods on protected slopes, oak-hickory mid-slope, northern hardwoods + spruce-fir on the highest peaks (Mt. Mitchell to 6,684 ft). Long the eastern US's wettest non-coastal region; many endemic plants tied to perched coves.