This article was originally published on Mongabay as Creative Commons.
Myanmar is a country of extremes. From tropical forests, mangroves and wetlands to frost-bitten alpine mountain slopes and jagged limestone karst outcrops, it’s home to tremendous botanical diversity. Orchids alone account for more than 1,200 species, and researchers have described scores of new-to-science plant species in recent years, including a color-shifting Begonia and a rare type of ginger that flourishes in lofty cloud forests.
Yet there remain glaring gaps in what’s known about Myanmar’s floristic diversity. “Myanmar hosts exceptionally high plant diversity and endemism,” Ke-Ping Ma, a biologist at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Mongabay. “However, there has been a long-standing lack [of] plant distribution data, due in part to limited field surveys and incomplete digitization of herbarium records.”
Political instability inflamed by the 2021 military coup also severely hampers biological research. Some of the most unstable parts of Myanmar are also the most biologically rich. Once protected by their remoteness, these areas are increasingly threatened by rampant natural resource extraction as vying political groups seek to fund their operations.
“Biodiversity is often one of the neglected victims of war because you can’t go and collect data, and you also can’t protect areas,” said Alice Hughes, a biologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia. “We have very little data even on basic things like [patterns of] habitat destruction. Whilst we can get some of that information from satellites, obviously, anything requiring on-the-ground information is very, very challenging.”
The lack of knowledge about plants risks species slipping into oblivion before they’ve even been documented, Hughes said. This includes species that occur nowhere else on the planet — Myanmar is home to 864 endemic plant species. It also hampers efforts to create strategies to stem the loss of biodiversity in a country where resources for conservation are notoriously thin on the ground.
In a new study, Hughes and Ma aim to close these key gaps. Together with their colleagues from China and Myanmar, they modeled the distribution of plant species that had been recorded five or more times in the country, amounting to roughly 8,100 species of plants — a figure they note likely represents only a fraction of Myanmar’s total flora.
The study, published in the journal Biological Conservation, provides an updated baseline of botanical diversity across Myanmar, covering flowering and non-flowering plants, ferns, mosses and liverworts. It also pinpoints the areas where conservation efforts for plants are most urgently needed.
Mountains and tropical lowlands
Mountainous landscapes in Kachin state in the north of Myanmar were identified as floristically rich and important refugia for endemic species. These areas included the snowcapped Hkakaborazi National Park, Emawbum National Park, and the Nujiang Langcang Gorge Alpine Conifer and Mixed Forests ecoregion. The team also singled out botanical hotspots in Chin Hills in Chin state, Dawna Hills in Karen state, and tropical lowland evergreen and semi-evergreen forests in the Tanintharyi region in the south.
Many potentially botanically rich areas had to be left out of the analysis due to fragmented or completely missing survey data, the study notes, including crucial habitats for not just plants but also countless threatened animals. These areas host wetlands, savannas and limestone karsts, which “should be being protected,” Hughes said.
Rugged mountain chains were prominent priority areas for plants in the analyses due to the high incidence of cool-adapted and range-restricted species there, Ma said. Protecting these areas and ensuring their connectivity across landscapes will be vital in the face of climate shifts, he noted. “Higher elevation mountain regions and forested corridor networks that provide safe, stable conditions and allow gene flow [can] help ensure the long-term resilience of plant communities.”
Kate Armstrong, an assistant curator at the New York Botanical Garden, who wasn’t involved with the study, said the new botanical mapping is a valuable step, even though incomplete plant records in Myanmar limit the level of detail possible for now.
Armstrong, who conducted botanical research in the country’s north between 2014 and 2019, said that while climate change is definitely a concern for plants, the most imminent threat is land-use change. This includes the construction of roads into supposedly protected areas, such as Hkakaborazi National Park, she said, as well as mining for amber, jade and gold. “Some of the gold and amber mines are run by local villagers just trying to scrape by, whereas other mines (probably the majority) are government enterprises with Chinese companies,” she said.
Multiple investigations also show that in the rush for mineral revenues, clandestine rare earth mining is also taking a toll in remote and biodiverse border areas of Kachin and Shan states. Meanwhile, deforestation remains rife across many of the most floristically diverse areas identified in the new study. Global Forest Watch data indicate that between 2002 and 2024, Myanmar lost 800,000 hectares (2 million acres) of humid primary forest, representing a 6% reduction in old-growth rainforest cover.
Boost research capacity and protections
The researchers say that while it’s unlikely proactive conservation measures will be put in place while the political situation remains unstable, they recommend expanding the coverage of protected areas over the longer term. The team found that only about 16% of the areas identified in the study as priority areas for endemic plant species lie within protected land.
To boost protected area coverage, the researchers recommend a combined approach that incorporates locally led and Indigenous initiatives. Many of the floristically diverse areas identified in the study overlap with territories stewarded by Myanmar’s 135 ethnic groups, who manage 30-40% of the country’s land mass, the study notes.
The researchers point to Kaydoh Mae Nyaw Wildlife Sanctuary, an area managed by Indigenous customary practices in Karen state, as an example of successful area-based biodiversity protection that goes beyond the junta’s prevailing state-controlled approach that, without appropriate management or resources, risks protected areas becoming little more than “paper parks.”
“Even if we were to draw a protected area on a map, if [policymakers] don’t allocate resources to make them real, then you’re still probably going to see tree felling and the harvesting of plants and animals,” Hughes told Mongabay.
Protected areas currently cover 6.4% of land in Myanmar, according to the study. The authors recommend the junta formally recognize forest reserves co-managed by Indigenous communities and incorporate “other effective area-based conservation measures” (OECMs) into conservation strategies. Such an approach could achieve multiple aims, they say, including peace-building, climate resilience and biodiversity preservation.
However, given biological research expertise took a hit in the aftermath of the 2021 coup as environmental specialists exited the country amid public clampdowns, Hughes said Myanmar’s institutional capacity to make decisions based on scientific evidence is lacking.
“The multiple challenges in Myanmar highlight the need for further collaborative research to just help us move things forward together,” she said, adding that boosting taxonomic research expertise within Myanmar, particularly among young researchers, as well as consistent funding of conservation initiatives will also be crucial to preserving what remains of Myanmar’s biodiversity in the near-future.
Ma said that if further protections and sincere action to improve the outlook for Myanmar’s floristically diverse habitats aren’t forthcoming, there’s more at stake than species losses.
“Once lost, these species and the evolutionary history they represent cannot be recovered,” he said. “The decline of plant diversity would have broader effects on ecosystem stability, water regulation, pollination systems, and the livelihoods of communities who depend on natural resources.”
Carolyn Cowan is a staff writer for Mongabay.
Citations:
Yang, B., Deng, M., Zhang, M.-X., Moe, A. Z., Ding, H.-B., Maw, M. B., … Tan, Y-H.. (2020). Contributions to the flora of Myanmar from 2000 to 2019. Plant Diversity, 42(4), 292-301. doi:10.1016/j.pld.2020.06.005
Maw, M. B., Hein, K. Z., Naing, M. K., Yu, W.-B., & Tan, Y.-H. (2023). Taxonomic studies on Begonia (Begoniaceae) in Myanmar III: Begonia kayinensis (sect. Monophyllon), a remarkable new species from Kayin State, Southern Myanmar. Taiwania, 68(4), 407-411. doi:10.6165/tai.2023.68.407
Aung, T. S., Shen, X.-L., Hughes, A. C., & Ma, K.-P. (2025). Conservation prioritization based on plant richness and endemism in Myanmar. Biological Conservation, 312, 111503. doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2025.111503
Dunne, E. M., Raja, N. B., Stewens, P. P., Zin-Maung-Maung-Thein, & Zaw, K. (2022). Ethics, law, and politics in palaeontological research: The case of Myanmar amber. Communications Biology, 5(1). doi:10.1038/s42003-022-03847-2