Why is there so many new plant discoveries in Zhejiang, the "treasure house of southeastern plants"?

Recently, the "2021 Annual Report on New Taxonomic Groups and New Name Changes in China's Plants" published in the journal "Biodiversity" showed that in 2021, my country published a total of 342 new taxonomic groups of higher plants, involving 391 plant taxonomists.

Chen Zhenghai, senior engineer at Zhejiang Forest Resources Monitoring Center, ranked first among Chinese scholars with 33 new taxa published. This is the second consecutive year that he has ranked first.

According to the statistics of the "2020 Annual Report on New Taxa and New Names of Chinese Plants" and the "2021 Annual Report on Changes in New Taxa and New Names of Chinese Plants", the Zhejiang Provincial Forest Resources Monitoring Center has achieved remarkable results in publishing Chinese plant species, publishing 25 in 2020 and 47 in 2021.

Biodiversity

As the main force in the investigation and monitoring of wild animal and plant resources in Zhejiang Province, the center's team members work hard in the wild all year round, and their footprints are all over Zhejiang's major mountains, islands, harbors, lakes and wetlands.

Since the 13th Five-Year Plan, the center team has undertaken and completed major projects such as the survey of vegetation resources in islands and coastal zones in Zhejiang Province, the first and second national surveys of wildlife resources, key protected plant resources and wetland resources in Zhejiang Province;

The research published 97 new plant taxa, represented by new species such as Jingning Cyclobalanopsis, Fengyangshan Viburnum, Southern Zhejiang Osmanthus, and Xianxialing Euphorbia, as well as more than 150 new record taxa of geographical distribution at the provincial level and above, making the province with the highest density of new plant discoveries in East China, greatly enriching the public's understanding of biodiversity.

"The best botanical research is definitely not done sitting in an office." Chen Zhenghai, the leader of the center's team, has been sticking to his original aspirations for 40 years since he took up the job of forest resource monitoring in 1983. In order to quickly find out the "family background" of Zhejiang's forest resources, especially the endangered and rare species unique to the protected areas, he led the team to conduct in-depth research, spending two-thirds of the year in the wild. Camouflage uniforms, a pair of Jiefang shoes, and a backpack filled with dozens of kilograms of equipment are his daily standard.

At present, Chen Zhenghai has researched and published more than 90 new plant taxa, and discovered and reported more than 300 new plant taxa with provincial and above geographical distribution records. He is known as the "living map of Zhejiang's wild plant resources."

What is biodiversity?

Biodiversity is the ecological complex formed by organisms (animals, plants, and microorganisms) and the environment, as well as the sum of various ecological processes related to it. It includes three levels: ecosystem diversity, species diversity, and genetic diversity.

Biodiversity makes the earth full of vitality and is the foundation of human survival and development. It can be protected through in situ conservation and ex situ conservation.