Foreign Experts in Yunnnan: Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz. An elephant expert working in Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden.

Thilina, a Sri Lankan student whose Chinese name is Li Xiang, came to China to pursue a doctorate degree at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in southwest China's Yunnan Province. Mainly studying beetles here, and enjoying the good scientific environment and climate, he said "China is my second hometown.”

In ongoing taxonomic studies of the genus Begonia in the island of Mindanao, researchers from Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) and their collaborators collected a population of peculiar Begonia section Petermannia species. After meticulously examining its morphology and comparing it with protologues and available digitized type specimens from across the Philippines and neighbouring countries, the researchers confirmed it as a subspecies of Begonia bangsamoro new to science.

In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers from the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG), the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the University of Bristol, and the Open University of the United Kingdom report exceptionally rich assemblages of plant spine fossils collected from late Eocene (about 39 million years ago) sediments in central Tibet.

Researchers from the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have identified three species of Vespa hornets that help move most Aquilaria sinensis seeds to more suitable places before they lose viability by eating the plant’s fruit. Results were published in Current Biology.

In a study published in Science of the Total Environment, researchers from Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) tried to evaluate the spatial pattern of nitrogen and phosphorus cycling functional genes and to find out their potential influence on the aboveground plant community in a hyper-diverse tropical forest ecosystem in Xishuangbanna.

During floristic exploration of Mêdog, Tibet, researchers from Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) collected some unknown Agapetes materials of an interesting plant with fruits from two locations in the understory of a primeval subtropical forest. After careful morphological comparison, they confirmed the plant represents a new Agapetes species and published it in Taiwania.

My name is Akihiro, or Aki Nakamura, from Japan. I came to China in 2013, almost 9 years ago. I have been working here, in Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, XTBG, ever since. At the moment, I’m working as a professor and a group leader of the Forest Canopy Ecology Lab. My life here has been great.