Sulawesi Lowland Rain Forests

The Sulawesi lowland rain forests are a tropical moist forest ecoregion in Indonesia that covers the lowlands of Sulawesi and a ring of neighboring islands, among them the Banggai and Sula Islands, the Sangihe and Talaud Islands, Buton and Muna, and the Selayar Islands. The islands belong to Wallacea, which lies in the Australasian realm but was never joined to the Asian or Australian continents, so many of its animals and plants evolved in isolation. The main plant communities are lowland evergreen and semi-evergreen rain forest, with seasonally dry monsoon forest at the tip of the southeast peninsula and patches of freshwater and peat swamp forest. The ecoregion holds 104 mammal species, 29 of them endemic or near-endemic, including the Makassar, Gursky's spectral, Jatna's, spectral and Peleng tarsiers, and about 7 percent of its area lies inside protected areas.