Vegetation

Southeast Asia is not a natural biogeographical unit: it extends well north out of the tropics in Myanmar, while the eastern boundary bisects the island of New Guinea. It is also divided in two by one of the sharpest zoogeographical boundaries in the world, Wallace’s line (Figure 7.1; Whitmore 1987). There is, however, one important unifying feature that distinguishes it from most other regions of the tropics: Southeast Asia is a region of forest climates. Only on the highest mountains in Papua and northern Myanmar is the climate too cold for forest and, with the possible exception of some small rain-shadow areas, it is nowhere too dry. Elsewhere the only permanent non-forest vegetation in the region before the human impacts of the last few millennia was on coastal cliffs and beaches, seasonally flooded river plains, active volcanoes, and perhaps some small inland areas on soils too poor to support forest. Today, however, as a result of human impacts, forest occupies less than half of the region, with various anthropogenic vegetation types occupying the rest. The recognition of Southeast Asia, as defined here, as a separate political and geographic entity is very recent, so it is not surprising that there has been no previous account of the vegetation of the whole region. Van Steenis (1957) gave a general account of the vegetation of Indonesia, while Whitmore (1984) concentrated on the tropical evergreen forests of the region, with only a brief description of the vegetation of drier climates. Champion (1936) described the principal forest types of Myanmar, while Vidal (1997) covered the vegetation of Thailand, Cambodia, and Lao PDR. Numerous other publications describe smaller areas or specific vegetation types. To a first approximation, the potential natural vegetation of the region (Plate 1) up to about 20°N is controlled by two main environmental gradients: a horizontal gradient of water availability and a vertical, altitudinal gradient. Water availability is determined largely by the amount and distribution of rainfall, with the length of the dry season the most important factor, although the water storage capacity of the soil becomes increasingly significant at the drier end of the gradient.