Walk into the "Sawana" of the Red River Valley

Starting from Honghe County, driving along the Yuanman Expressway to Yuanjiang County for about half an hour, you will arrive at the Red River Valley Mountain Future Rural Revitalization Innovation Center. In the dry and hot valley with no grass in the ravines, the innovation center surrounded by green is particularly eye-catching.

Coming here, there is a often mentioned word "Savannah", which is a transliteration of the local African language, meaning "savannah". "Savannah" is mainly distributed in Africa, South America, and parts of Australia, and there are small areas in China's Hainan Island and Yunnan. According to plant community research, the Red River Valley is distributed with the most typical valley-type "Savanna" vegetation in Asia, and its biological resources are very rich, which is a unique representative of biodiversity.

For a long time, due to the local circulation of the atmosphere caused by the incineration effect and the closed terrain, the dry and hot valleys of the Red River are ecologically fragile and the soil degradation is more serious. In 2018, Xu Jianchu, a researcher at the Kunming Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and chief scientist of the World Agricultural Forestry Center, first came to the dry and hot valley area of Honghe County and became interested in it. In June of the same year, Xu Jianchu led the scientific research team to cooperate with the Honghe County Government to establish a future rural revitalization innovation center with a total area of 3,300 mu in the Mountains of the Red River Valley, and started the "scientific research journey".

In the past three years, the innovation center has invested a total of 30.71 million yuan to build a living preservation bank of germplasm resources in the dry and hot river valley, a three-dimensional plantation of Qiao shrub grass, the construction of an agricultural and forestry composite and biomass recycling industry system, the monitoring and analysis of mountain ecosystems, and the modern demonstration base of water and fertilizer integration is 32 mu, and the modern nursery base is 100 mu.

It's the hottest part of summer, but at the Innovation Center nursery site, it's a colorful picture. All kinds of seedlings and flowers are cultivated by the mountain, and they are red and purple. At present, the Valley Mountain Future Innovation Center has introduced more than 20,000 plants of 35 species of rare and precious woody economic plants, laying the foundation for the conservation of biodiversity and sustainable economic development in the Red River Valley.

Xu Jianchu, who is currently the director of the Innovation Center, introduced: "The innovation center has completed 400 acres of ecological restoration, repairing the slope along the highway for two kilometers, and at the same time, the nursery has planted characteristic plants such as kapok, baobab trees, big lychee king, emblica seeds, etc., laying a good foundation for the next step of ecological restoration." ”

Reporter Li Shufen Correspondent Mao Jinghua Text/Photo

Source: Yunnan Daily