The limestone karst, or Tsingy
Forests of razor-sharp stone where every canyon is a separate island. Millions of years of isolation have made the Tsingy one of the most micro-endemic, and least studied, places on Earth.
The biome at a glance
Where one cannot walk barefoot
Tsingy is the Malagasy word for "where one cannot walk barefoot", and it fits. Across the west and north-west, ancient reefs lifted out of the sea have been carved by rain into labyrinths of stone pinnacles, some 30 to 40 metres tall, split by narrow canyons, underground rivers and hidden valleys.
The effect is extreme fragmentation. Plants that took root in one canyon have been cut off from their neighbours by impassable stone for millions of years, evolving on their own. The result is a landscape where a very small area can hold enormous diversity, and where local endemism can be exceptionally high.
Bemaraha, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Ankarana and Beanka each carry partly different flora. A plant found in one may be missing from the next. Each system is its own natural experiment in isolation.
Each Tsingy canyon is, in effect, a separate island. Millions of years apart have produced plant lineages that share no recent ancestor with anything described anywhere else.
Barely charted
Because every canyon is isolated, the Tsingy is exactly the kind of place where distinctive plant life arises, and it is almost entirely uncharted. Only a small fraction of its plants have been studied in any depth, out of a flora of several hundred species. This is not a place where the discoveries have mostly been made and only details remain. It is a place where the discovery has hardly begun.
The stone that protected the Tsingy's plants for so long also makes them hard to reach and study. Documenting what grows in these canyons, before pressure on the surrounding land grows, is part of protecting one of the most remarkable landscapes on Earth.