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Malesia is a biogeographical region straddling the Equator and the boundaries of the Indomalayan and Australasian realms, and also a phytogeographical floristic region in the Paleotropical Kingdom. The original definition by the World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions included Papuasia, but this was split off in its 2001 version. Malesia was first identified as a floristic region that included the Malay Peninsula, the Malay Archipelago, New Guinea, and the Bismarck Archipelago, based on a shared tropical flora derived mostly from Asia but also with numerous elements of the Antarctic flora, including many species in the southern conifer families Podocarpaceae and Araucariaceae. The floristic region overlaps four distinct mammalian faunal regions. The first edition of the World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) used this definition, but in the second edition of 2001, New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago were removed from Malesia and were united with the Solomon Islands, previously placed in the WGSRPD's Southwestern Pacific region, being placed into a new region, Papuasia. Sundaland The western part of Malesia, which includes the Malay Peninsula and the islands of Sumatra, Java, Bali, and Borneo, shares the large mammal fauna of Asia and is known as Sundaland. These islands are on Asia's relatively shallow continental shelf, and were linked to Asia during the ice ages, when sea levels were lower. The eastern edge of Sundaland is the Wallace line, named after Alfred Russel Wallace, the nineteenth-century British naturalist who noted the difference in fauna between islands on either side of the line. Dipterocarps are predominant trees in the lowland forests of Sundaland. Sundaland has the greatest diversity of Dipterocarp species, with 10 to 14 native genera and approximately 450 native species, including approximately 267 species on Borneo, 155 on the Malay Peninsula, and 106 on Sumatra.

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Related concepts (11)

Sundaland

Sundaland (also called Sundaica or the Sundaic region) is a biogeographical region of South-eastern Asia corresponding to a larger landmass that was exposed throughout the last 2.6 million years during periods when sea levels were lower. It includes Bali, Borneo, Java, and Sumatra in Indonesia, and their surrounding small islands, as well as the Malay Peninsula on the Asian mainland. The area of Sundaland encompasses the Sunda Shelf, a tectonically stable extension of Southeast Asia's continental shelf that was exposed during glacial periods of the last 2 million years.

New Guinea

New Guinea (Niugini; Hiri Motu: Niu Gini; Papua, fossilized Nugini, or historically Irian) is the world's second-largest island, with an area of . Located in Melanesia in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, the island is separated from Australia by the wide Torres Strait, though both landmasses lie on the same continental shelf. Numerous smaller islands are located to the west and east. The eastern half of the island is the major land mass of the independent state of Papua New Guinea.

Wallacea

Wallacea wQ'leisi@ is a biogeographical designation for a group of mainly Indonesian islands separated by deep-water straits from the Asian and Australian continental shelves. Wallacea includes Sulawesi, the largest island in the group, as well as Lombok, Sumbawa, Flores, Sumba, Timor, Halmahera, Buru, Seram, and many smaller islands. The islands of Wallacea lie between the Sunda Shelf (the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Borneo, Java, and Bali) to the west, and the Sahul Shelf including Australia and New Guinea to the south and east.