When the Luosuo River, the largest tributary of the Lancang River, takes an almost round-about turn in Mengla County of Yunnan Province, it encircles a piece of land blanketed with trees and meadows. On that land lies the largest tropical botanic garden in China that is home to more than 13,000 species of flora.

In the words of Richard Corlett, a world-renowned British conservation biologist, it was China's sincere commitment to biodiversity conservation that brought him to the country's Yunnan province in July 2012. Before then, Corlett had studied tropical plants for over three decades in Southeast Asia. After receiving an invitation from the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, he happily packed his bags and embarked on a new research journey.

In a recent study published in One Earth, researchers from the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and their collaborators have put forward a framework that combines ecosystem services, ecological sensitivity, and biodiversity indicators (involving 10,311 species) to determine ecological priorities across Mainland Southeast Asia (M-SEA), by using China's ecological conservation redline as a basis.

The report, called Checklist of New and Newly Recorded Species in Yunnan (1992-2020), was released by the Department of Ecology and Environment of Yunnan Province and the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Kunming, the provincial capital, is scheduled to hold the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity on Monday.

Chinese plant researchers recently discovered a new population of rare species derived from the Berberidaceae plant family in the Longling county of Baoshan city, southwest China's Yunnan Province.

In a study published in Global Change Biology, researchers from Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) investigated the effect of an extreme snow event on the ecosystem radiative forcing changes in Ailaoshan subtropical forest.