March 21 marks the international day of forests, I’m now in Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG), one of the largest botanical gardens of the rainforest ecosystem, drawing international experts to do research on ecology and wildlife protection. Today, I’m meeting one of them, Prof. Jose Ahimsa, to talk about his thoughts and insights about the rainforest and Asian elephant protection

In a study published in New Phytologist, researchers from Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) and University of Kentucky have revealed the biogeographic rules of seed dormancy in global extensive climate type and the divergent adaptations of woody and herbaceous species.

In a correspondence published in Current Biology, researchers have identified three active compounds in sex pheromones produced by virgin queens of the species Vespa mandarinia, the world’s largest hornet. When placed in field traps, synthetic compounds of these compounds and a queen-equivalent mixture rapidly attracted hundreds of males instead of females or other species.

“I suspect … that rhinos are much more important for the plants they disperse, than the fruits of these plants are for rhinos,” says study co-author Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Southeast Asia Biodiversity Research Institute.

The Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences was established in the late 1950s by the late Cai Xitao, a respected botanist, in southwest China’s Yunnan Province. Now, a group of young scientists are carrying forward Cai’s scientific spirit.

In a study published in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, researchers from Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) investigated the water uptake depths and water use-related leaf traits of three co-occurring dominant canopy tree species at different growth stages in a MMEBF in Yunnan, SW China.

The researchers from the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, cooperated with Chinese and American institutions and compiled a large database of understory biomass at the community level across China's forests to explore the large-scale patterns of understory biomass and root-shoot ratio.

As part of a Franco-Chinese partnership, “scientists have identified the sex pheromone of the Asian hornet and tested it as bait in China and France.They thus showed that the pheromone bait could attract many males during the species' reproduction period (from September to November) and thus keep them away from the future queens at the origin of new colonies, "explains a press release from the University of Tours.