Among the shared plant families on the tropical continents, the legumes stand out because they dominate the rain forests of both Africa and the Neotropics in terms of basal area and overall biomass (Gentry, 1988 and Corlett and Primack, 2011). Throughout the Asian-Pacific region, and on Sundaland in particular, the Dipterocarpaceae claim this role. Nonetheless, 45% of the genera of the legume subfamily Papilionoideae are represented in the Asian-Pacific region. Furthermore, besides producing some of the largest canopy trees, the legumes are also an important family in terms of the number of climber-, or liana species (Corlett and Primack, 2011). Sundaland, or the Sunda Shelf, is the western part of the Malesian region (Raes and van Welzen, 2009 and Lohman et al., 2011) and covers the Malay Peninsula and the islands of Borneo, Sumatra, Java and Bali. The northern boundary is delimited at the Kangar–Pattani line on the Malay Peninsula (Van Steenis, 1950), which approximately coincides with the country border between Malaysia and Thailand (Fig. 1). Given the goals of the GLDA, and the current knowledge on the floristic position of legumes on Sundaland, we raised the following question: ‘Is legume diversity indicative for overall botanical diversity on Sundaland, South East Asia?’