2001; Holloway 2003; Hall et al. 2010; Gower et al. 2010). Southeast Asia is defined herein as including Myanmar, Xishuangbanna (in southernmost Yunnan, China), Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (of India), and western parts of Indonesia (including Borneo, Java and Sumatra). Wallace (1876) divided this part of Asia into the

Indochinese, Sundaic, and Philippine zoogeographic subregions (Fig. 1). A fourth subregion, the Wallacean, lies to the east and has a largely Australian biota and will therefore receive less attention in this review. The diverse communities this website within each subregion share a common biogeographic history and many genera and families of plants and animals.

A finer scale classification of the biota has been proposed by World Wildlife Fund: dividing the traditional subregions (bioregions) into smaller units called ecoregions, 31 Indochinese, and 28 Sundaic and Philippine ecoregions (Wikramanayake et al. 2002). These ecoregions contain geographically distinct sets of natural communities that share a majority of their species, ecological dynamics and environmental conditions. Major natural vegetation communities include TPCA-1 in vivo tropical rainforest, tropical Small molecule library seasonal forest, tropical deciduous forest, savanna woodland and grassland, montane forests, mangrove forests, and swamp forests (Corlett 2009a). Using the ecoregion as the “fundamental conservation unit”, priorities can be based on each ecoregion’s Casein kinase 1 biodiversity distinctiveness index and a quantitative assessment of various threats. The biodiversity distinctiveness index captures measures of endemism, species richness, higher taxonomic uniqueness, and the presence of rare habitats (Wikramanayake et al. 2002). Fig. 1 Outline map of Southeast Asia showing the four biogeographic subregions (bioregions or hotspots). According to some

authorities the Indochina and Sundaic bioregions meet on the Thai-Malay peninsula at the Kangar-Pattani Line; others place the transition near the Isthmus of Kra. The Sundaic and Wallacea bioregions meet at Wallace’s Line between Borneo and Sulawesi Southeast Asia covers only 4% of the earth’s land area but is home to 20–25% of the planet’s plant and animal species and is a major global biodiversity hotspot (Myers et al. 2000; Mittermeier et al. 2005; Corlett 2009a). The countries in this region are among the richest in terms of species numbers of plants, mammals, birds and turtles. Indochina hosts >7,000 endemic plant species (52% of the flora); Sundaland is even richer, with >15,000 endemic plant species (Brooks et al. 2002). Marine patterns are beyond the scope of this review, but the shallow warm waters of the region harbor 30% of the world’s coral reefs and the greatest diversity of reef associated animals in the world (Spalding et al. 2001).