Researchers have confirmed Taiwan’s tallest known tree: an 84.1-meter (276-foot) Taiwania fir they named “the Heaven Sword of the Da’an River.”A team called the “Taiwan tree seekers” found it after a decade-long search using airborne laser scans of the island’s forests.A group of 372 citizen scientists helped sort through the data, producing a map of 941 giant trees across Taiwan.The giant trees store huge amounts of carbon but face growing threats from drought, lifting clouds, stronger typhoons, and illegal logging.
Deep in Taiwan’s misty mountains, researchers have confirmed the tallest tree in the country: a thousand-year-old fir tree higher than a 20-story building, which they’ve named “the heaven sword of the Da’an River.”
Climbers scaled the tree and dropped a measuring tape from the top to the forest floor during the Lunar New Year holiday in January 2023. The tree measured 84.1-meters (276-feet). The findings have been published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change.
A team of ecologists, geologists, remote-sensing specialists, professional climbers and Indigenous people that calls itself the “Taiwan tree seekers” began the search in 2014.
“The common characteristics [of the team] are probably that we are all tree lovers and like adventures,” Rebecca Chia-Chun Hsu, lead author from Division of Forest Ecology, Institute of Taiwan Forestry Research, told CNN.
