· The Greatest Flower Show on Earth
· Special Features
· Did You Know?
· Wild Side
· Cause for Concern
· Looking Ahead

Global 200 Snapshot

The Kinabalu Montane Shrublands are the only mountainous shrublands in Asia with such a high number of rare animals and plants. Many of these species are endemic.

The Greatest Flower Show on Earth

How far would you go to find the perfect orchid? If you were willing to climb Mount Kinabalu in Borneo (it's 13,450 feet, or 4,100 m, to the top -- and the highest mountain in Southeast Asia), you'd be able to see the greatest concentration of wild orchids in the world. Along the way, you'd encounter countless types of other plants, as well as birds, butterflies, and other animals. The Kinabalu Montane Shrublands is the only place on Earth that many of them call home.

Special Features

A series of mountain ranges stretches across the island of Borneo. At the northern end lie the Kinabalu Montane Shrublands. Vegetation there is lush, mostly because of heavy rain. In fact, the wet season in Borneo lasts eight months of the year (October through May), and there's so much rain at other times that the island is never really dry. Such natural conditions are great for all the climbing and flying creatures that like to eat fruit, seeds, and insects.

	Believe it or not, you have a lot in common with the orangutans of Borneo: nearly 97 percent of your genes, to be exact. The fact that so many of human and orangutan genes are identical makes our bodies work in many of the same ways. But there are big differences, too. For starters, orangutans give birth only once every eight years.

Wild Side

It's pretty impressive when 77 species of orchids can all be found in one area. But the ecoregion also contains many types of magnolia, rhododendron, ferns, mosses, and figs. The species of vascular plants have been estimated at 4,500. Hundreds of different birds live here and nowhere else, like the Kinabalu serpent eagle, the black-sided flowerpecker, and the blue-wattled bulbul. Rodents scamper on the moist ground, including the summit rat, the large pencil-tailed tree mouse, and the Bornean mountain ground squirrel. And three types of primate can be found in Kinabalu: the grizzled leaf monkey, the tarsier, and the orangutan.

Cause for Concern

This incredible diversity has remained intact because few people live in the northern parts of Borneo. But all of this is changing as more and more tourists come to visit. Places for them to stay are being built, and people often trample or pick plants and flowers. Another big problem is the logging of rare tropical trees for timber. In addition, parts of the Kinabalu Park are being cleared for agriculture, mined for minerals, and turned into golf courses.

Looking Ahead

The Kinabalu Montane Shrublands are currently relatively stable, except for the lower elevation forests. The Malaysian government has adopted conservation laws. Some specific rules have helped, too. For example, it's been illegal to own, kill, or capture orangutans since 1963. But if humans continue to develop the region's natural habitat and resources, many rare plants and animals could be lost forever.