Hopea malibato
Definition
Hopea malibato is a rare dipterocarp tree endemic to the Philippines, known from very few localities in the country’s remaining forest patches. Like its relatives it belongs to a family of tropical hardwoods defined by winged fruits.
Identities
| Source Type | Identity |
|---|---|
| Wikipedia | Hopea malibato |
| Wikidata | Q5485875 |
| DBpedia | N/A |
Also Known As
Malibato (from the vernacular epithet used when the species was described).
Examples and Analogies
H. malibato is a botanical needle in a haystack: so seldom recorded that each confirmed stand rewrites maps — the plant equivalent of a bird known mainly from old specimens and lucky sightings.
Usage Scenarios
- Focus of targeted botanical surveys in remaining forest fragments
- Candidate for ex-situ conservation collections
- Reference point in assessing Philippine dipterocarp rarity
Strategies
With so few known stands, the priority is documentation: locating and marking populations, banking seeds, and shielding sites from incidental logging rather than attempting any harvest management.
Security and Safety Measures
Site confidentiality is itself protective — published coordinates of rare trees invite poaching — so conservationists share locality data through curated databases rather than open lists.
Historical Context
The species was described from twentieth-century Philippine collections as botanists continued sorting the archipelago’s dipterocarps, and it has remained one of the family’s scarcer Philippine members ever since.
Challenges and Controversies
Its extreme rarity makes every potential threat existential: a single road cut or kaingin clearance can erase a stand, and the poverty of records means its true status may be better or far worse than assessments suggest.
Related Topic
Tangile (Shorea polysperma) — a better-known Philippine dipterocarp endemic sharing the same shrinking lowland habitats