About the Research Area
Atherton Tablelands, Wet Tropics World Heritage Area, Queensland
Australia’s Wet Tropics World Heritage Area (WTWHA) is situated in the northeast of Queensland. The region extends for about 450 kilometres between Townsville and Cooktown. The tropical rainforest is mostly associated with a series of mountain ranges running from north to south parallel to the coast.
In the Daintree part of the region, the scenery changes from coral reefs and beautiful beaches to lowland lush tropical rainforest and up into spectacular mountains covered in cooler upland cloud forests.
The mountain ranges are generally about 1,000 metres in altitude but some areas rise to over 1,600 metres. Vegetation in the region varies from dry savanna dominated by eucalypts to the moss-draped mountaintop cloud forests.
The spectacular biodiversity and scenery of the region make the area a world-class destination by any standard.
The rainforests are the remnants of a huge forest that once dominated the whole of northern Australia. The animals and plants here now are the species that have hung on as the rainforest contracted and expanded during the Pleistocene.
One result of this is that most of the unique species are restricted to the cooler uplands where there have been refugia throughout the ice ages.
This factor contributes to making the endemic fauna of the region vulnerable to climate warming. These forests are home to well over 2,000 vascular plants.
The rainforests in the region have been subjected to selective logging in many areas and clearing and fragmentation in some areas, primarily on the Atherton Tableland and the coastal lowlands.
Despite these impacts, most of the upland rainforest is now completely protected in the WTWHA and is in relatively pristine condition.