The Wallace Line or Wallace's Line is a faunal boundary line drawn in 1859 by the

British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace and named by English biologist Thomas
Henry Huxley that separates the biogeographic realms of Asia and Wallacea, a
transitional zone between Asia and Australia. West of the line are found organisms
related to Asiatic species; to the east, a mixture of species of Asian and
Australian origin is present. Wallace noticed this clear division during his
travels through the East Indies in the 19th century.

The line runs through Indonesia, between Borneo and Sulawesi (Celebes), and through
the Lombok Strait between Bali and Lombok. The distance between Bali and Lombok is
small, about 35 kilometres (22 mi). The distributions of many bird species observe
the line, since many birds do not cross even the shortest stretches of open ocean
water. Some bats have distributions that cross the line, but larger terrestrial
mammals are generally limited to one side or the other; exceptions include
macaques, pigs and tarsiers on Sulawesi. Other groups of plants and animals show
differing patterns, but the overall pattern is striking and reasonably consistent.
Flora do not follow the Wallace Line to the same extent as fauna.[1] One genus of
plants that does not cross the Line is the Australasian genus Eucalyptus, except
for one species, Eucalyptus deglupta, which naturally occurs on the island of
Mindanao in the Philippines.