Qualla: Tonle Sap–Mekong Peat Swamp Forests

Tonle Sap–Mekong Peat Swamp Forests: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Every-leaf-that-trembles, CC BY-SA 4.0. Three numbers describe this place. Of the roughly 29,500 square kilometres the ecoregion covers along the Tonle Sap and Mekong floodplains, eighty-five percent has been brought under cultivation. Fifteen percent is still forested. Less than one percent has any legal protection at all. Set against most conservation writing, those figures read as a failure — and they are, if what you want is wilderness. They also describe one of the most productive agricultural systems humans have ever built, because what replaced the swamp forest is rice, and the rice feeds a very large number of people. Both things are true at once, and the tension between them is the whole story of the lower Mekong.

Image: Every-leaf-that-trembles | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tonle Sap–Mekong Peat Swamp Forests: Water That Never Leaves

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Every-leaf-that-trembles, CC BY-SA 4.0. The defining feature here is not flooding but permanence. Most of the Mekong basin drains and refills on an annual rhythm — the great pulse that reverses the Tonle Sap River every monsoon and makes the lake swell to several times its dry-season size. This ecoregion is the excepti...

Image: Every-leaf-that-trembles | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tonle Sap–Mekong Peat Swamp Forests: Four Broken Pieces

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Every-leaf-that-trembles, CC BY-SA 4.0. The ecoregion is not a region so much as a scatter. Four main sectors survive. The smallest lies northwest of Tonle Sap Lake, on the outer fringe of the lake's wetlands. A second sits east of the Tonle Sap River. A third straddles the Cambodia–Vietnam border along the left bank o...

Image: Every-leaf-that-trembles | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tonle Sap–Mekong Peat Swamp Forests: Paperbark

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Every-leaf-that-trembles, CC BY-SA 4.0. Closest to the brackish edge grow the paperbark swamps, and they are the signature habitat of the whole system. Melaleuca leucadendra, the long-leaved paperbark, is a member of the myrtle family whose bark peels away in pale papery sheets, and stands of it produce a grey-white fo...

Image: Every-leaf-that-trembles | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tonle Sap–Mekong Peat Swamp Forests: The Slivers That Remain

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Every-leaf-that-trembles, CC BY-SA 4.0. What protection exists comes in fragments. Parts of the ecoregion fall inside the Tonlé Sap Biosphere Reserve; Cambodia adds Borey Cholsar Wildlife Sanctuary and the Boeung Prek Lapouv Ramsar site. On the Vietnamese side, U Minh Thượng National Park holds 80.5 square kilometres o...

Image: Every-leaf-that-trembles | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tonle Sap–Mekong Peat Swamp Forests: Bringing the Cranes Back

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Quoilp at Vietnamese Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Tràm Chim, in Đồng Tháp province, is the case that argues for optimism. This corner of the Plain of Reeds was drained and sprayed with herbicide during the Vietnam War, and the wetland it had been did not simply recover on its own. Beginning in 1985, workers set about restoring t...

Image: Quoilp at Vietnamese Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0