- This article is about the Indomalayan geographical region. For the ethnic Albanian highland region in Montenegro and Albania, see Malësia. Malësia ( Albanian Malësia e Madhe, Serbian: Малесија is a geographical region in northern Albania and eastern Montenegro. For other uses, see Malesia (disambiguation).
Malesia is a biogeographical region straddling the boundary of the Indomalaya and Australasia ecozones. Biogeography is the study of the distribution of Biodiversity over Space and Time. The Indomalaya ecozone is one of the eight Ecozones that cover the planet's land surface The Australasian zone is an ecological region that is coincident but not synonymous (by some definitions with the geographic Region of Australasia Malesia was first identified as a floristic province that included the Malay Peninsula, Indonesia, the Philippines and New Guinea, 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. A Phytochorion, in Phytogeography, is a geographic area with a relatively uniform composition of plant species The Malay Peninsula or Thai-Malay Peninsula (Semenanjung Tanah Melayu (คาบสมุทรมลายู is a major Peninsula located in Southeast The Republic of Indonesia ( (Republik Indonesia is a Country in Southeast Asia. The Philippines ( Filipino: Pilipinas, officially known as the Republic of the Philippines (fil ''Republika ng Pilipinas'' RP New Guinea, located just north of Australia, is the world's second largest island, having become separated from the Australian mainland when the area now known Antarctic flora is a distinct community of Vascular plants which evolved millions of years ago on the supercontinent of Gondwana, and is now found on several separate Podocarpaceae is a large family of mainly Southern Hemisphere Conifers with 18-19 genera and about 170-200 species of Evergreen Trees and The Araucariaceae are a very ancient family of Conifers They achieved maximum diversity in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods when they existed almost The floristic province overlaps four distinct mammalian faunal regions. Mammals ( class Mammalia) are a class of Vertebrate Animals characterized by the presence of Sweat glands, including sweat glands
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. Sumatra (also spelled Sumatera) is the sixth largest island in the world (approximately 470000 km² and is the largest island entirely in Indonesia (two Java (Jawa is an Island of Indonesia and the site of its Capital city Jakarta. Bali is an Indonesian Island located at, the westernmost of the Lesser Sunda Islands, lying between Java to the west and Lombok to Borneo is the third largest island in the world and is located at the centre of Maritime Southeast Asia. Sundaland is a biogeographical region of Southeastern Asia that comprises the Malay Peninsula and the Malay Archipelago islands of Sumatra These islands are on Asia's relatively shallow continental shelf, and were linked to Asia during the ice ages, when sea levels were lower. An ice age is a period of long-term reduction in the Temperature of the Earth 's surface and atmosphere resulting in an expansion of continental Ice sheets 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. The Wallace Line (or Wallace's Line) is a boundary that separates the zoogeographical regions of Asia and Australia. Alfred Russel Wallace OM, FRS (8 January 1823 &ndash 7 November 1913 was an British naturalist, Explorer, Geographer
The eastern end of Malesia, which includes New Guinea and the Aru Islands of eastern Indonesia, is linked to Australia by a shallow continental shelf, and shares many marsupial mammal and bird taxa with Australia. The Aru Islands (also Aroe Islands or Kepulauan Aru are a group of about ninety-five low-lying Islands in the Maluku province of eastern Indonesia Marsupials are an Infraclass of Mammals characterized by a distinctive pouch (called the marsupium) in which females carry their young through A taxon (plural taxa) or taxonomic unit, is a name designating an organism or a group of Organisms In Biological nomenclature according to New Guinea also has many additional elements of the Antarctic flora, including southern beech (Nothofagus) and gums (Eucalyptus). Nothofagus, also known as the southern beeches, is a genus of about 35 Species of Trees and shrubs native to the temperate oceanic Eucalyptus (From Greek ευκάλυπτος meaning "well covered" is a diverse Genus of Trees (and a few shrubs the members of which
The islands between Sundaland and New Guinea, called Wallacea, were never linked to the neighboring continents, and have a flora and fauna that include Indomalayan and Australasian elements. Wallacea is a biogeographical designation for a group of Indonesian islands separated by deep water Straits from the Asian and Australian The Philippines were also never connected to Asia, and have a largely Asian-derived flora with some Australasian elements, and a distinct mammalian fauna. The Philippine Archipelago is one of the world's great reservoirs of Biodiversity and endemism.
External links
Media related to Indomalaya from the Wikimedia Commons.
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