Introduction

Papua New Guinea (fig. 1) comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea. It is a geomorphologically diverse country in the South-West Pacific Ocean and contains four large provincial islands and over 600 smaller islands. The total land area of the country is 459,854 km² (Saunders 1993) with enormous social, cultural, and biophysical diversity. The country is located on the boundary between the northward moving Australian continental plate, and the north-west moving Pacific plate, which makes it one of the tectonically active areas in the world. The main islands are characterised by block-faulted, folded, and mountainous interiors. The highest peak is Mt. Wilhelm in the Simbu province, which rises to 4,510 metres above sea level. The deltaic flood plains provide the largest areas of lowlands especially along the south coast, where freshwater swamplands are common.

Terrestrial habitats range from extensive lowlands with rainforest, savanna, grassland, and freshwater swamps to upland montane rainforests and alpine grassland (table 1). The marine and aquatic environments appear equally diverse. Papua New Guinea's native flora comprise an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 species of vascular plants, including cat 2,000 species of orchids, and more than 2,000 species of pteridophytes (Johns 1993).

Papua New Guinea culture is richly varied and people have lived in the lowlands for at least 40,000 years (Groube et al. 1986) and in the highlands for more than 24,000 years (White and O'Connell 1982). More than 750 different linguistic groups have been identified, with a variety of cultural responses to the environment. Great linguistic diversity in PNG is unmatched elsewhere and it has been suggested that the number of languages used is likely to be over 800.

Table 1 - Areas of Various Vegetation Types in Papua New Guinea (after Beehler 1985)