SW China's Yunnan makes great efforts to protect wildlife species

As one of the world's biodiversity hotspots, southwest China's Yunnan province has made major efforts to protect its vast diversity of wildlife species.

Yunnan boasts all manner of ecosystem types apart from oceans and deserts and is home to 2,242 species of vertebrates, accounting for 51.4 percent of the country's total, and 19,333 species of already known higher plants, or 50.1 percent of the country's total.

Photo shows a golden monkey in the Yunnan Golden Monkey National Park located in Deqen Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Yunnan province. (Photo/Chinanews.com)

Over the past two years, new species have been discovered almost every one or two weeks in Yunnan. Meanwhile, more than 100 species have been discovered in the Gaoligong Mountains located in the western part of the province over the past 10 years.

In a bid to protect these diverse species, Zhang Ting, a seed collector with the Kunming Institute of Botany of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his colleagues spend about a third of their time each year in the wild, collecting a total of 10,601 species and preserving 85,046 specimens for the Chinese germplasm bank of wild species.

Zhang calls his work "offering insurance" for wild plants. "We deposit seeds in a 'bank', so that if they are needed, these seeds can be returned to the wild, which also gives species conservation an additional safeguard," he explained.

Yunnan is also committing itself to protecting Germplasm resources for rare species of animals such as black snub-nosed monkeys and black-necked cranes.

The green peacock, a critically endangered species with a total population of less than 600 and found only in Yunnan, maintains normal brooding activities in all the main distribution areas, with the distribution range of the species in some areas expanding prominently.

Monitoring of the green peacock population in a nature reserve in Shuangbai county, Yunnan province carried out by Yang Xiaojun, a researcher with the Kunming Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, shows that thanks to enhanced patrolling efforts in recent years, the population of green peacocks in the reserve and its surrounding areas has expanded from 52 in 2015 to nearly 100.

Apart from green peacocks, the population of black snub-nosed monkeys in the province has also increased from more than 1,400 in 2000 to more than 3,000, and the number of black-necked cranes overwintering in Yunnan has soared from more than 1,600 in 1996 to over 3,000.

In a bid to restore the habitat space of rare species, Yunnan has contributed one seventh of its territorial area to nature reserves. According to statistics, today, Yunnan has approved the establishment of a total of 362 nature reserves.

In addition, 90 percent of the province's important ecosystems, more than 90 percent of national key protected plants and about 80 percent of national key protected animals have been listed as the main protected targets under effective protection in the nature reserves.

Outside the nature reserves, Yunnan has created 30 special protection sites for wild plants with very small populations in the province, including Nyssa yunnanensis, Cyclobalanopsis sichourensis and Manglietiastrum sinicum, effectively refining the in situ conservation system.