No, it's not in Brazil or Borneo. It's actually in the good old USA, literally and figuratively clinging to a steep slope in a drainage called Mahanaloa Gulch on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai. We need to stop twiddling our thumbs and SAVE THIS FOREST NOW.
I first visited this mystical forest shortly after I began a postdoctoral fellowship in restoration ecology at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in 1996. To my novice eyes, this gulch contained a beautiful but bewildering quilt of plants. Even more bewildering was the fact that several species I had recently seen elsewhere in the archipelago looked so different (what had been, say, a small shrub on another island had magically transformed into a vinelike tree here) that I never would have recognized them without my colleagues' help.
What also struck me about this remnant forest was that every other plant seemed to be another federally endangered species found only on Kauai. We later realized that since 1) Hawaii has the world's most unique and endangerment flora, 2) Kauai has the most unique and endangered flora of all the Hawaiian Islands, and 3) Mahanaloa Gulch has the most unique and endangered flora on Kauai, to the best of our knowledge, that particular forest contained the most unique and endangered flora on the planet!
New post from Robert Cabin, author of the forthcoming book Intelligent Tinkering writing on Huffington Post Green. Read the rest of his post here
Island Press Field Notes administrator.