A Chinese scientific investigation team on Sunday released the updated height of China's tallest tree as 83.4 meters, according to the Shanghai Chenshan Botanical Garden.
The record-breaking tree, Abies ernestii var. salouenensis, is located in a mountain valley area in southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region. With an average elevation of 2,800 meters, the area has large precipitation, mild climate, and moderate sunshine.
The tree was first found during a scientific investigation conducted by the Institute of Botany under the Chinese Academy of Sciences in May this year. Researchers discovered a number of giant trees with a height of more than 75 meters in the forest, among which the Abies ernestii var. salouenensis was initially measured at 83.2 meters by a drone.
An expedition team from the Institute of Botany, the Shanghai Chenshan Botanical Garden, and other institutes measured the height of the tree again in August and confirmed it to be 83.4 meters.
The researchers also measured the tree's diameter at breast height to be 207 cm and decided that it is about 380 years old. (Xinhua)
Last year, researchers at KIZ published the first high-quality tree shrew reference genome in Nature Communications. This year, YAO Yonggang's team at KIZ has gone one step further by launching the world's first Tree Shrew Database to provide access to the most current tree shrew data.
CHINA is holding back the desert, for now. The Great Green Wall – a massive belt of trees being planted across China's arid north in what might be the largest ecological engineering project on the planet – seems to work, according to a new study. "Vegetation has improved and dust storms have decreased significantly in the Great Green Wall region, compared with other areas," says Minghong Tan of the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resource Research in Beijing. But whether planting trees is a long-term solution remains disputed.
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