 Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical moist montane forest and subtropical or tropical high-altitude grassland.The mountain serin was formerly placed in the genus "Serinus" but a phylogenetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA sequences found that the species was not closely related to other member of "Serinus" nor to the geographically nearest finch, the Vietnamese greenfinch but to the European Goldfinch "Carduelis carduelis" and to the Citril Finch "Carduelis citrinella".The species was therefore assigned to a separate genus "Chrysocorythus", a name that had previously been proposed by the German ornithologist Hans Edmund Wolters in 1967.