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This region contains some of the last relatively intact moist forests in Indochina that still harbor large mammals, including several newly discovered species. This Global 200 ecoregion is made up of these terrestrial ecoregions: Southern Annamites montane rain forests; Northern Annamites rain forests It isn’t often that scientists discover new large mammals. In fact, scientists have discovered just six large mammal species worldwide in the entire last century. But during the 1990s, within a space of five years, two new large mammals were discovered in these forests -- the saola, or Vu Quang ox, and a deer called the giant muntjac.
Over the last 50 million years, during periods of climatic change, these mountain forests continually intercepted the moisture-laden monsoon winds that blew in from the Gulf of Tonkin and retained their moist conditions. This allowed the plants and animals that were adapted to moist conditions to seek refuge here and evolve into specialized species that are found nowhere else on Earth. The Annamite Montane Forests are home to a variety of mammals, including tigers, several species of muntjak, gibbons, leaf monkeys, an endangered monkey called the douc langur, and the newly discovered saola. Visit the forests and you might encounter noisy flocks of sooty babblers perched in bamboo thickets. And you may spy an imperial pheasant, a handsome bird with a purple-blue plumage. If you’re really lucky, you may witness the courtship display of a male green peafowl as he raises his brilliant green tail feathers and fans them out behind him to impress a female.
The natural communities of the Annamite Range Moist Forests are threatened by commercial logging, large hydropower projects, unsustainable levels of shifting cultivation, and intensive illegal hunting. Pressure on these mountain forests and the animals that live there is increasing as people from the densely populated lowlands of Vietnam move into the region.
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