Boundaries

This ecoregion includes the Hainan Island off the coast of China between the Gulf of Tonkin and South China Sea. It is separated from the Leizhou Peninsula by the Qiongzhou Strait.

Terrestrial habitats

The ecoregion includes two terrestrial ecoregions: the Hainan Island monsoon rain forests and the South China-Vietnam subtropical evergreen forests (Wikramanayake et al. 2002).

Description of endemic fishes

There are no recorded endemic species in this ecoregion.

Justification for delineation

For Southeast Asia, delineations were determined using a bottom-up approach that employed both published and unpublished field data and expert assessment (Abell et al. 2008). This ecoregion tentatively includes the whole island of Hainan, China, but the available species distribution data are too coarse to know whether the island is made of one or two ecoregions. It is also possible that some of Hainan (ie. the southern portion) belongs to the Song Hong basin [ecoregion 761] and the rest to Xi Yiang [ecoregion 763] (M. Kottelat pers. comm. 2006).