About Research Institute of Tropical Forestry, Chinese Academy of Forestry

Research Institute of Tropical Forestry, Chinese Academy of Forestry

The Research Institute of Tropical Forestry, Chinese Academy of Forestry — RITF — is based at Longdong, Guangzhou, Guangdong, at Guangzhou 510520 in its published addresses. The FAO Directory of Forestry Research Organizations records its establishment date as 1962 and its main research areas as ecology, fuel wood, silviculture, tree improvement, agroforestry, biotechnology and conservation. RITF is a leading Chinese centre for research on tropical and south-subtropical plantation forestry, including the genetics and breeding of eucalyptus, and on the biomass and carbon storage of south subtropical humid forests around Guangzhou. It is the Chinese Academy of Forestry's institute for the hot, wet south — the zone where China's fastest-growing timber plantations and some of its richest natural forests meet — and its scientists' output ranges from eucalyptus chromosome maps to newly described plant species from Hainan's rainforest.

History and mandate

Established in 1962, RITF predates the modern plantation boom it would come to serve: China's large-scale eucalyptus planting expanded from the 1950s, but systematic breeding research began in the 1980s, and the institute in Guangzhou was positioned to lead it. The FAO directory's list of its research areas — ecology, fuel wood, silviculture, tree improvement, agroforestry, biotechnology and conservation — captures a breadth typical of the academy institutes of its generation: production forestry and protection forestry under one roof. The institute hosts the Key Laboratory of State Forestry Administration on Tropical Forestry, named in its authors' affiliations, and its email domain, ritf.ac.cn, appears on correspondence for its genetics groups. From Longdong, in Guangzhou's Tianhe district hills, it runs field trials and plantations at several locations in Guangdong, including Gonghe Town, where its ethics statements record that the institute itself establishes and manages the tree plantations used in its experiments.

Eucalyptus genetics and breeding

Eucalyptus is RITF's signature crop. Introduced to China as early as 1890 and planted at scale from the 1950s, eucalyptus had reached 5.4674 million hectares of plantations in China by 2018, and the institute's researchers are among the architects of its improvement. A 2015 comparative genomics study in PLoS ONE, led by authors from RITF and the State Key Laboratory of Tree Genetics and Breeding, constructed dense genetic maps for Eucalyptus urophylla and E. tereticornis from genomic and EST-derived simple sequence repeats, finding extensive chromosome collinearity with the E. grandis reference genome and detecting novel quantitative trait loci — the genomic groundwork for marker-assisted breeding of growth and wood traits. RITF breeding material circulates through south China's plantation industry: hybrids such as TH9211, an E. urophylla by E. camaldulensis cross, and TH9117, E. urophylla by E. tereticornis, bred by the Research Institute of Tropical Forestry, are the parentage behind clones planted by the Leizhou Forestry Bureau, including its LH-series selections. Reviews of Chinese eucalyptus breeding record the strategy documents of the 1980s and 1990s — the 1987 Sino-Australian Dongmen strategy, the 1991 South China strategy under a World Bank afforestation project, and the 2010 Chinese Eucalyptus Breeding Alliance plan — as the framework within which institutes such as RITF have worked.

Plantation science: sites, soils and successive plantings

Breeding is only half of plantation forestry; the other half is matching trees to land and managing rotations. RITF's Key Laboratory of Tropical Forestry researchers classified site types for the widely planted hybrid Eucalyptus urophylla by E. grandis in southern Yunnan, setting 130 standard plots in one-to-fifteen-year-old plantations in Pu'er and Lincang to relate dominant tree growth to site factors — work aimed at ending the species-site mismatches that had degraded forests and lowered production where eucalyptus expanded inappropriately. Institute groups also study what successive eucalyptus planting does to soil microbial communities and nutrient cycling, how Acacia mangium and Pinus massoniana monocultures alter soil denitrifying bacteria in southern China, and how bacterial wilt, caused by Ralstonia pseudosolanacearum, can be carried latently in asymptomatic eucalyptus cuttings — a biosecurity problem for a clonal plantation industry. This is the science of keeping a fast plantation estate productive and defensible over decades, and it is published from Guangzhou because the estate itself is in the south.

Natural forests: Jianfengling and tropical ecology

RITF's second identity is as an ecologist of natural tropical forest. Its researcher Han Xu, a professor at the institute with more than 130 publications in systematics, botany and ecology, works on the Jianfengling forest dynamics plot on Hainan Island — a 60-hectare permanent plot with 164 satellite quadrats — one of the large monitored forests through which Chinese ecologists track how tropical rainforest assembles and changes. Institute-linked taxonomy from the same forests includes the description of a new species of Thismia, a mycoheterotrophic plant genus, T. jianfenglingensis, from Hainan. Studies of rubber and eucalyptus plantations' effects on microbial community assembly, and of biomass and carbon storage in the south subtropical humid forests around Guangzhou, extend the ecological programme from pristine rainforest to the working landscape — the gradient along which all of south China's forestry decisions are actually made.

Rehabilitation and international exchange

The institute's experience has been used internationally. In 2004 RITF hosted a CIFOR workshop on learning lessons from China's forest rehabilitation efforts, with special focus on Guangdong Province — the province whose hills were among China's most degraded in the twentieth century and whose re-greening became a reference case for rehabilitation policy. CIFOR, the Center for International Forestry Research, chose the Guangzhou institute as host because Guangdong's rehabilitation was its subject and RITF its scientific chronicler. The FAO directory listing itself is part of the same pattern: RITF is the address to which the world's forestry research system writes for tropical China. Its collaborations run from Australian eucalyptus science — foundational to the breeding strategies of the 1980s — to the genomics consortia that produced the eucalyptus reference genome its mapping work uses.

People and platforms

The institute's senior scientists are identifiable across its fields: Siming Gan, corresponding author of the eucalyptus genomics work at ritf.ac.cn; Han Xu in tropical ecology and systematics; Sen Meng, a professor at the institute working on plantation soil ecology and eucalyptus disease, with dozens of publications and approaching a thousand citations in research-profile records. The Key Laboratory of State Forestry Administration on Tropical Forestry gives these groups a shared national platform, and the institute's own plantations and trial sites give them something rarer — land. Field forestry cannot be done from a desk, and RITF's ethics and methods statements, recording plantations it establishes and manages for research at sites such as Gonghe Town in Guangdong, show an institute that owns its experimental infrastructure outright.

Why the institute matters

China's tropical and south-subtropical zone holds the country's most productive plantations and its most irreplaceable natural forests, and the Research Institute of Tropical Forestry, established in 1962, is the Chinese Academy of Forestry's centre for both. Its eucalyptus maps, clones and site science underpin a plantation estate of more than five million hectares; its Jianfengling plot and taxonomy serve the conservation of Hainan's rainforest; its rehabilitation experience has been exported through CIFOR to the world's forest-restoration community. Production and protection are usually rival mandates. At Longdong in Guangzhou, they have shared one institute for over sixty years, and the institute's record suggests the combination is a strength rather than a compromise.

Agroforestry, fuel wood and conservation in the mandate

The FAO directory's research-area list for the institute — ecology, fuel wood, silviculture, tree improvement, agroforestry, biotechnology and conservation — preserves the priorities of its founding era and explains parts of its work that plantation genetics alone would not predict. Fuel wood research addressed the rural energy needs of south China, where village woodlots were a real land use; agroforestry addressed the mixed tree-crop systems of the tropical south; and conservation, present in the mandate from the directory record onward, is the strand that grew into the Jianfengling plot, the institute's systematics and its humid-forest carbon work around Guangzhou. Biotechnology, likewise in the original list, is the strand that matured into the eucalyptus genomics programme. Read together, the seven FAO areas describe an institute built to serve tropical land use whole, not a single commodity.

Official website: caf.ac.cn (Chinese Academy of Forestry)