Qualla: Cardamom Mountains rain forests

Cardamom Mountains rain forests: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dmitry Makeev, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the waterlogged hollows on the southern slopes, the rainforest stops at twelve metres. That is not a clearing or a fire scar - it is the mature canopy, a dwarf rain forest whose dominant trees are conifers, Dacrydium elatum and Podocarpus neriifolius, with Nageia fleuryi and Dacrycarpus imbricatus scattered among them. Standing in it feels like standing in a scale model of somewhere else. Walk uphill a few hundred metres and the same ecoregion throws up a closed canopy three times that height, built out of tropical oaks. The Cardamom Mountains rain forests cover about 44,289 square kilometres of eastern Thailand, southwestern Cambodia and the Vietnamese island of Phu Quoc, and they contain more variety over short distances than almost anywhere else in mainland Southeast Asia - much of it, because of the terrain and the sparse human population, still only loosely described by science.

Image: Dmitry Makeev | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cardamom Mountains rain forests: Where the Rain Stops

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Zyr2000, CC0. Geography here is a story about a wall. The Cardamom and Elephant ranges stand across the path of the southwest monsoon, wringing it out on their seaward flanks and leaving the country behind them comparatively parched. The consequences show up in the map of neighbouring ecoregio...

Image: Zyr2000 | CC0

Cardamom Mountains rain forests: Oaks in the Tropics

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dmitry Makeev, CC BY-SA 4.0. Above roughly 700 metres the montane forest takes over, and it is dominated by a family most people associate with temperate woodland. Beeches and oaks - Fagaceae - form the bulk of the canopy: Lithocarpus cambodiensis, Lithocarpus guinieri, Lithocarpus farinulentus, Lithocarpus ...

Image: Dmitry Makeev | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cardamom Mountains rain forests: Named for the Range

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dmitry Makeev, CC BY-SA 4.0. Species found nowhere else carry the mountains in their names. The Cardamom Mountains wolf snake, Lycodon cardamomensis, and the Cardamom Mountains bent-toed gecko, Cyrtodactylus cardamomensis, are endemic reptiles. Among more than 450 recorded bird species, the chestnut-headed p...

Image: Dmitry Makeev | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cardamom Mountains rain forests: Protection on Paper, and Who Pays for It

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dmitry Makeev, CC BY-SA 4.0. The tiger is the ghost in this inventory. Older accounts list it among the ecoregion's fauna; in truth no wild tiger has been confirmed in Cambodia since 2007, and the species is now considered gone from the country. Reintroducing it was one of the stated ambitions behind the des...

Image: Dmitry Makeev | CC BY-SA 4.0