Wet Tropics
Extending over around 9,000 square kilometres along the northeastern side of the Great Dividing Range and the various coastal ranges, highlands, tablelands, foothills and escarpments between Townsville — more accurately, north of Rollingstone and the Paluma turnoff on the Bruce Highway — and Cooktown Queensland's Wet Tropics contain the Earth's oldest continuously surviving tropical rainforests.
World Heritage listed since 1988, and added to the Australian National Heritage List in May 2007, the tropical forests have the world's highest concentration of primitive flowering plant families and numerous unique plant and animal species. While the area covers a mere 0.1% of the Australian landmass 50 per cent of the nation's species are found there.
The area spans all or part of thirteen major river systems — the Annan, Bloomfield, Daintree, Barron, Mulgrave, Russell, Johnstone, Tully, Herbert, Burdekin, Mitchell, Normanby and Palmer Rivers — numerous national parks, covering 15% of the area, and over 700 protected areas including privately owned land.
Significant national parks within the Wet Tropics include:
- Barron Gorge National Park
- Kalkajaka National Park
- Cedar Bay National Park
- Daintree National Park
- Girramay National Park
- Girringun National Park
- Kirrama National Park
- Kuranda National Park
- Macalister Range National Park
- Wooroonooran National Park
However, while the area is Wet by definition, rainfall varies considerably — between 1200 millimetres annually in areas of effective rain shadow to more than 8,000 mm along the escarpment between Tully and Cairns, where a coastline running north-south lies across prevailing southeasterly rainbearing winds. Further south, in the Dry Tropics, the coastline tends to run parallel to the southeasterlies, with uplands around Mount Elliot and behind the Whitsunday Coast creating a rain shadow.
Throughout the North, most of the rainfall occurs during The Wet season — from November to April — when there is the perennial threat of cyclones forming in the Coral Sea or the Gulf of Carpentaria to add to the seasonal deluge.
