FAO Forestry country profiles - natural woody vegetation

Forest cover map

The designations employed and the presentation of material in this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.

Map source: Global Forest Resources Assessment 2000, base map: ESRI

The above map is an extract from the Global Forest Cover map produced as part of FRA 2000. Please refer to FRA Working Paper 19 for a background to the production of the map.

The Republic of the Marshall Islands is a sprawling Micronesian archipelago that includes 29 coral atolls and 5 table reefs, all essentially flat and composed of coral limestone. Because they are spread 1 150 km from north to south, there is a marked moisture gradient, from semiarid in the north to very humid in the south. The vegetation is conditioned by moisture availability and salt spray exposure, and has been affected by occasional severe hurricanes, several thousand years of human occupation, and more recently, World War II activities, nuclear testing and conversion of land to coconut plantations, resulting in a highly altered landscape. Woody vegetation communities are restricted to mixed broadleaf forests and a variety of mono-dominant tree and scrub communities. The following description of vegetation types is derived from Mueller-Dombois and Fosberg (1998).