FAO Forestry country profiles - natural woody vegetation

Forest types

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 Solomon Islands is an archipelago of numerous islands stretching south-east for over 1 450 km from Bougainville to Vanuatu in western Melanesia, with an outlier (Santa Cruz Islands) to the south-east. All of the islands are in the very wet, humid equatorial tropics. The main island group includes several large islands (Choiseul, Guadalcanal, Kolombangara, Malaita, New Georgia, San Cristobal and Santa Isabel), with elevations ranging up to 2 331 m (Mt. Popomanaseu on Guadalcanal). The Santa Cruz group comprises three larger high islands (Santa Cruz, the largest at 519 km2; Utupua; and Vanikoro, the highest at 900 m) and several smaller island groups, and is phytogeographically distinct from the rest of the Solomons in that the genus Agathis (the kauri trees) appears in the flora. This genus occurs nowhere else in the Solomons, thus allying the Santa Cruz group to the floras of Vanuatu, Fiji, and New Caledonia. A wide range of ecological zones and substrates allows for a variety of vegetation types: littoral, mangrove, and freshwater swamp forests; mixed species lowland rain forests, the most widespread vegetation cover in the Solomons; montane rain forests on the higher islands; seasonally dry forest on the leeward slope of Guadalcanal; and anthropogenically modified vegetation resulting from rotating subsistence gardening, planting of tree gardens and logging, which impacts all of the previously mentioned natural vegetation types. The following description of vegetation types is derived from Mueller-Dombois and Fosberg (1998).