Qualla: The Last Cathedral of Trees

The Last Cathedral of Trees: Introduction

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nicolai Edgar Andersen, CC BY-SA 4.0. Count 1,173 tree species in a single plot of forest. That is what researchers found when they measured every trunk wider than a finger in a 52-hectare rectangle of Lambir Hills National Park, a lowland rainforest in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. No comparable patch of Old World forest has yielded a higher number. Yet this extraordinary concentration of botanical life occupies a park smaller than many cattle ranches, a remnant surrounded by oil palm plantations and logged-over hills. Lambir is both a treasury and a warning, a place where the richness of tropical evolution presses against the consequences of its destruction.

Image: Nicolai Edgar Andersen | CC BY-SA 4.0

The Last Cathedral of Trees: A Forest Measured to the Centimeter

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1991, the Sarawak Forest Department, Harvard University's Center for Tropical Forest Science, and Osaka City University launched one of the most ambitious botanical inventories ever attempted. They staked out 52 hectares of Lambir's mixed dipterocarp forest and set about measu...

Image: Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE | CC BY-SA 2.0

The Last Cathedral of Trees: Giants and Their Tenants

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE, CC BY-SA 2.0. The tapang tree, Koompassia excelsa, punches through the canopy and keeps climbing. Specimens in Lambir exceed 80 meters, their smooth, pale trunks rising without branches for dozens of meters before spreading into the open sky above the forest. That slippery bark is no accident ...

Image: Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE | CC BY-SA 2.0

The Last Cathedral of Trees: The Emptying

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE, CC BY-SA 2.0. Lambir's botanical riches make its faunal losses all the more jarring. Biologists have recorded 237 bird species, 64 mammal species, 46 reptile species, and 20 frog species in the park, but those numbers describe a past that is slipping away. Surveys conducted between 2003 and 20...

Image: Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE | CC BY-SA 2.0

The Last Cathedral of Trees: Wings and Waterfalls

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JeremiahsCPs, CC BY-SA 3.0. Not everything at Lambir is measured in data sets. The Rajah Brooke's Birdwing, Malaysia's national butterfly, still drifts through the understory on black wings slashed with electric green. Alfred Russel Wallace named the species in 1855 for James Brooke, the first White Rajah o...

Image: JeremiahsCPs | CC BY-SA 3.0