A thousand years old and 20 storeys high: tracking down Taiwan’s tallest trees
Get the Health newsletter
Daily health & science — research, biotech, public health, the studies worth knowing. Free.
- Taiwania cryptomerioides dubbed "Heaven Sword of the Da'an River" measures 84.1 metres and is approximately 1,000 years old, according to a study led by Dr. Rebecca Hsu of the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute published this month in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change.
- Dr. Rebecca Hsu and her team spent more than a decade mapping Taiwan's giant trees, scanning forests from the sky and then hiking for days through rugged terrain — including crossing a river swollen by a recent snowstorm — to measure the towering trees in situ by climbing them.
- Lidar technology proved unreliable on Taiwan's steep slopes: in Hsu's study, 93% of lidar tree measurements turned out to be inaccurate when reviewed by citizen scientists, and Matheus Henrique Nunes of the University of Maryland said resolution drops the farther the laser travels from its target.
- Taiwan's tall trees face mounting climate threats, with researchers finding a 4-5% death rate over the past decade — described by Hsu as "beyond our imagination" — while research shows typhoons striking the island have grown 35% stronger over the past four decades.
- Ancient giants worldwide are in similar peril: 17.6% of California's large giant sequoias have burned since 1984, with most dying in 2020 and 2021, and 2019 fires in Tasmania killed at least 17 of the Australian state's largest trees.
- The climbing expedition to Heaven Sword required firing a fishing line up the tree from an air cannon, then replacing it with rope scaled by the team using foot ascenders; naturalist Steve Pearce of Australia's Tree Projects reported the first 45 metres is a branchless straight trunk topped by a healthy, still-growing crown more than 80 metres in the air.
Why it matters: The headline-grabbing record hides a darker finding: Taiwan's tall trees are dying at a 4-5% clip per decade while typhoons intensify 35%, and the very tool used to find them — lidar — gets 93% of candidates wrong on steep terrain. For conservationists cataloguing the world's ancient giants, that 93% error rate means the true inventory may be both smaller and more vulnerable than airborne surveys suggest.
Ask SkimNews
