About Chinese Academy of Forestry

Chinese Academy of Forestry

The Chinese Academy of Forestry (CAF; Zhongguo Linye Kexueyuan) is China's national comprehensive, multidisciplinary public-benefit forest research institution. Established in 1958 and based at Dongxiaofu, Xiangshan Road, Haidian District, Beijing, it is affiliated with the National Forestry and Grassland Administration. CAF brings together more than twenty research institutes and centres, plus dozens of associated institutions, in what its partners describe as a complete national forestry innovation system. It has run postgraduate education since 1979 and was among the first institutions in China authorised to award master's and doctoral degrees. It publishes forestry science research and information through its official website, caf.ac.cn, and is profiled here as a knowledge institution for forests: their ecology, cultivation, protection, products and policies.

Establishment in 1958 and National Mission

CAF was established in 1958, less than a decade after the founding of the People's Republic of China, when reforestation, timber supply and the protection of farmland and watersheds were urgent national tasks. A single national academy gave those tasks a permanent scientific base. More than sixty years later, introductory material prepared for the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) still describes CAF in the same terms as its official summaries: a comprehensive, multi-discipline and public research institution, established in 1958, that has played a pivotal role in China's forest sector.

Its mission, in its own published wording, is dedicated to solving the major scientific issues bearing overall, comprehensive, critical and fundamental influences on forest development and ecological construction. Its research fields range from forest-related applied basic science and strategic high-technology research to technological exploration and soft science — studies of strategy and policy — for great social and public benefit. In short, CAF exists so that national decisions about planting, protecting and using forests rest on measured evidence rather than on assumption.

Affiliation and Place in the Forestry System

CAF is directly subordinate to the National Forestry and Grassland Administration (NFGA), the national authority formed from the former State Forestry Administration, and earlier descriptions name that affiliation as the State Administration of Forestry and Grassland. It is not a university, a ministry or a timber company: it is the research arm of the national forestry system, providing, in its partners' summary, strong support for national key strategic planning including national ecological civilisation, timber security and forest city construction.

That position makes CAF an information institution in a literal sense. Forest inventories, long-term ecosystem observations, genetic resource collections and experimental forests generate the data series on which Chinese forest policy is evaluated. When CAF reports progress in a field — desertification control, wetland restoration, mangrove rehabilitation or climate adaptation — it is usually reporting both a scientific result and a tested input for a national engineering programme.

Structure: Institutes, Centres and Branch Academies

Counts of CAF's structure vary slightly by date and by what is counted, and an honest profile should say so. A recent IUFRO introduction gives 22 research institutes and centres, 39 associated institutions and over 70 affiliated entities. An earlier China–Central and Eastern European forestry cooperation profile gives 19 research institutes and centres, 13 non-independent legal entities and 21 associated institutions, with total employment of 3,218, including six academicians. A company-profile summary likewise gives 19 research institutes and centres and 10 branch academies distributed across 18 provinces, regions and municipalities. The consistent picture behind the differing counts is a Beijing headquarters academy with a nationwide network of specialised institutes and regional branch academies, covering China's very different forest zones, from cold-temperate forests in the north-east to tropical forests in the south.

The disciplinary spread can be read from its research fields and institute names in published work: forest ecology, environment and protection; silviculture; wood industry and wood processing; chemical processing and utilisation of forest products; tropical and subtropical forestry; desertification control; wetland research; and forestry economics and policy. The Institute of Forest Ecology, Environment and Protection in Beijing, for example, appears as the home institution in international papers on China's forest ecosystem inventory system and hosts a key laboratory of forest ecology and environment under the national administration.

Research Fields and Scientific Achievements

CAF states that it has contributed thousands of new forest-related research findings and technological achievements over more than sixty years. Its listed areas of remarkable progress include genetic improvement of trees, forest silviculture, forest ecology and environment, desertification control, forest protection and conservation, forest resource management, wood and wood processing and utilisation, chemical processing and utilisation of forest products, forestry machinery, and forest development strategies and policies.

Its IUFRO summary singles out core-technology progress in nature protection, wetland rehabilitation and restoration, desertification control, forest disaster control, saline-alkali soil improvement, effective mangrove forest rehabilitation, and mitigation of and adaptation to climate change, among other key forestry ecological engineering programmes. Those are not abstract topics in China: they correspond to shelterbelt planting, returning farmland to forest, sandstorm control around northern cities, restoration of coastal mangroves, and the forest carbon work on which national climate accounting partly depends. CAF's role in each case is to develop, test and standardise the technique before it is applied at landscape scale.

Platforms, Experimental Bases and Ecosystem Networks

The academy's research rests on long-lived physical platforms. Its published facts and figures list one key national open laboratory in partnership with Northeast Forestry University — described as the only one on forests in China — one National Engineering Laboratory, two National Engineering Technique Centres, four National Forest Experimental Bases, three National Terrestrial Ecosystem Positioning Observation Stations, ten genetic resources (germplasm) banks and six ministerial natural reserves, as well as the first National Forest Alliance, the Wood and Bamboo Industry Technological Innovation Strategic Alliance.

CAF scientists are also central to the Chinese Forest Ecosystem Research Network (CFERN), described in the literature as a large ecology research network for long-term ecosystem located observation, embodying sites representing diverse ecosystems across all climate zones of China, and in later work as the largest nationwide network of forest ecological stations in the world. Work by CAF's Bing Wang and colleagues combined CFERN field observations of ecological indicators with China's Forest Resource Inventory, conducted every five years, to build a Forest Ecosystem Inventory System for continuously assessing forest ecosystem services. For a directory user, this is CAF's most important information product: not a single paper, but a continuing, standardised record of what China's forests are doing.

Publications and Research Output

CAF researchers publish in Chinese forestry journals and in international journals across ecology, plant science, materials and environmental science. Nature Index listings for the academy record output in journals including Nature Communications, Advanced Functional Materials, The Plant Cell, Nano Letters and Water Research — a spread that reflects how far modern forestry research extends, from tree genomics and forest carbon to advanced wood and bamboo materials. Forestry journals in the wider Chinese system, such as the Journal of Forestry Research and Forestry Research, publish work on forest ecology, botany, agroforestry and silviculture to which academy researchers contribute, although those titles are edited in the university sector and should not be mistaken for CAF house journals.

The academy's own channels are its website caf.ac.cn, its institutes' sites, conference proceedings and the reports and standards it supplies to the NFGA. Its soft-science work — on forestry development strategies and policies — is aimed at government readers as much as at academics. A balanced assessment of CAF's publication role therefore counts three outputs: peer-reviewed science, technical standards and germplasm and inventory data, and policy research for the national forestry administration.

Education and Talent

CAF has carried out postgraduate education since 1979, among the initial institutions in China able to confer master's and PhD degrees after graduate education was restored. Its Graduate School was approved in 2002, according to its partner profile, after which postgraduate education developed rapidly in facilities, subject construction, faculty and enrolment. The IUFRO introduction states that CAF confers degrees in the discipline categories of agronomy, science, engineering and management science, and has cultivated over 4,000 alumni who have played an active part in China's forest research.

Its earlier facts and figures counted 3,218 employees, among them six academicians — the highest domestic academic title — alongside nationally recognised professional talents. For a research academy without undergraduate teaching, alumni of more than four thousand represent a major channel of influence: graduates staff provincial forestry institutes, universities, administrations and industry across the country, carrying CAF methods and data standards with them.

International Cooperation

CAF describes a two-way international approach of 'bringing in' and 'going global'. Its IUFRO summary states that it has established close cooperative relationships with over 80 countries and 50 international organisations. In Europe, it is a partner in China–Central and Eastern European Countries forestry cooperation, and in 2017 it hosted the first International Conference on China-CEECs Forestry Research and Education Cooperation, with more than 200 participants from home and abroad; that conference identified priority fields including forest silviculture, forest ecology, environmental protection, forest monitoring and assessment and the forest bio-economy.

For WorldNM readers, the verified essentials are: Chinese Academy of Forestry, established 1958; headquarters at Dongxiaofu, Xiangshan Road, Haidian District, Beijing; affiliated with the National Forestry and Grassland Administration; website caf.ac.cn. Consult it as China's national source for forest science — for evidence on tree breeding, silviculture, forest ecology and carbon, desertification and wetland restoration, wood and bamboo technology, and the long-term ecosystem data against which the success or failure of China's vast planting and protection programmes can honestly be judged.