page_title: Mount Kinabalu
section_title: Flora
hierarchical_section_title: Mount Kinabalu / Biology / Flora
context_page_description: Mountain Kinabalu is a mountain located at Kadamaian, Kota Belud District, West Coast Division of Sabah, Malaysia. It is protected as Kinabalu Park, a World Heritage Site. Kinabalu is the highest peak in Borneo's Crocker Range and is the highest mountain in the Malay Archipelago as well as the highest mountain in Malaysia. Mount Kinabalu is also the 20th most prominent mountain in the world by topographic prominence.
  In 1997, a re-survey using satellite technology established its summit height at 4,095 metres above sea level, which is some 6 metres less than the previously thought and hitherto published figure of 4,101 metres.
  Mount Kinabalu includes the Kinabalu montane alpine meadows ecoregion in the montane grasslands and shrublands biome. The mountain and its surroundings are among the most important biological sites in the world, with between 5,000 and 6,000 species of plants, 326 species of birds, and more than 100 mammalian species identified. Among this rich collection of wildlife are famous species such as the gigantic Rafflesia plants and orangutans. Mount Kinabalu has been accorded UNESCO World Heritage status.
context_section_description: The flora covers the mountain in zones of different types of habitat as one climbs up, beginning with a lowland belt of fig trees and insectivorous pitcher plants. Then between 2,600 to 3,200 m (8,530 to 10,499 ft) is a layer of short trees such the conifer Dacrydium gibbsiae and dwarf shrubs, mosses, lichens, liverworts, and ferns. Finally many of the world's richest variety of orchids are found on the high rockier slopes.
  These plants have high levels of endemism (i.e. species which are found only within Kinabalu Park and are not found anywhere else in the world). The orchids are the best-known example with over 800 species including some of the highly valued Paphiopedilum slipper orchids, but there are also over 600 species of ferns (more than the whole of Africa's 500 species) of which 50 are found nowhere else, and the richest collection in the world for the Nepenthes pitcher plants (five of the thirteen are found nowhere else on earth) which reach spectacular proportions (the largest-pitchered in the world being the endemic Nepenthes rajah). The parasitic Rafflesia plant, which has the largest single flower in the world, is also found in Kinabalu (particularly Rafflesia keithii whose flower grows to  94 centimetres (37 in) in diameter), though blooms of the flower are rare and difficult to find. Meanwhile, another Rafflesia species, Rafflesia tengku-adlinii, can be found on the neighbouring Mount Trus Madi and the nearby Maliau Basin.
  Its incredible biodiversity in plant life is due to a combination of several unique factors: its setting in one of the richest plant regions of the world (the tropical biogeographical region known as western Malesia which comprises the island of Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula, and the island of Borneo), the fact that the mountain covers a wide climatic range from near sea level to freezing ground conditions near the summit, the jagged terrain and diversity of rocks and soils, the high levels of rainfall (averaging about 2,700 millimetres (110 in) a year at park HQ), and the climatic instability caused by periods of glaciation and catastrophic droughts which result in evolution and speciation. This diversity is greatest in the lowland regions (consisting of lowland dipterocarp forests, so called because the tree family Dipterocarpaceae are dominant). However, most of Kinabalu's endemic species are found in the mountain forests, particularly on ultramafic soils (i.e. soils which are low in phosphates and high in iron and metals poisonous to many plants; this high toxic content gave rise to the development of distinctive plant species found nowhere else).
caption: Large lower pitcher of Nepenthes rajah.
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