Plonked between the formidable Owen Stanley mountains to its west and the Solomon Sea to the east lies Oro, a remote province in Papua New Guinea east of the capital Port Moresby. Lush, green tropical rainforests, with their famed canopies, blanket the land while rivers and streams glitter in hues of turquoise and emerald—a landscape found across much of Papua New Guinea (PNG), where 71.8% of land still harbored primary forest in 2022, according to data from monitoring platform Global Forest Watch.
In these forests and the montane highlands thrive nearly seven per cent of the world’s biodiversity—30% of which is found nowhere else on the planet. “There’s many [more] species packed into the rainforest there than you’ll find in most places of the world,” says terrestrial ecologist William Laurance from James Cook University in Australia, who has studied the ecology of these forests for over 35 years.
For 80 million years, the New Guinea rainforest—the third largest on the planet—has remained isolated from the rest of the world and has evolved unique animals, including most tree kangaroo species (genus Dendrolagus), egg-laying mammals called long-beaked echidnas (genus Zaglossus), a poisonous bird called the hooded pitohui (Pitohui dichrous), and two of the three living species of cassowary (genus Casuarius). The island of New Guinea—which consists of PNG and Indonesian Western New Guinea, contains the highest number of recorded species of plants of any island and an unparalleled level of amphibian diversity.