Wet Tropics of Queensland World Heritage natural criteria

Key Finding

Inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1988, the 894,420 hectares Wet Tropics of Queensland World Heritage Area is extremely important for its rich and unique biodiversity.

The Area is widely cited or implicated in relation to high biodiversity and/or irreplaceability in several reviews.

It is included in the Biodiversity Hotspot “Forests of East Australia”, which is ranked third out of the 35 Global Biodiversity Hotspots.

The Area is deeply significant to more than 20 First Nations groups who applied extensive ecological knowledge to effectively manage the landscape across millennia.

The Area presents an unparalleled record of the ecological and evolutionary processes that shaped the flora and fauna of Australia, containing relics of the Gondwanan forest that covered Australia 50 to 100 million years ago.

All of Australia’s unique marsupials and most of its other animals, originated in rainforest ecosystems, with their closest surviving relatives occurring in the Wet Tropics. These living relics of the Gondwanan era, and their subsequent diversification, provide unique insights into the process of evolution. They provide us with important information for the interpretation of fossils of plants and animals found elsewhere in Australia, and about the evolution of Australia’s dry adapted sclerophyll (hard leaf) flora and marsupial fauna.

More information:

• Statement of outstanding universal value

Relevant Sustainable Development Goals’ targets

• 
• 
•