◎ Science and Technology Daily reporter Chen Yu
"Our result is a written academic work, but the process of forming the results has experienced hardships that are unimaginable to ordinary people." Recently, "Gaoligong Mountain Plant Resources and Fauna Geography" was officially published, talking about the process of writing the book, one of the authors, Li Rong, a researcher at the Kunming Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was very emotional.
Source: Hubei Science and Technology Press
"Plant Resources and Fauna Geography of Gaoligong Mountain" is a synthesis of the research results of Li Rong and Li Heng, a famous botanist and researcher of the Kunming Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in recent years, which embodies the team's 30 years of field investigation and indoor specimen identification.
Located in the southeast of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, Gaoligong Mountain is known by the academic community as the "World Species Gene Bank" because of its biological diversity. Due to the influence of traffic, environment and other factors, the field scientific investigation and research of Gaoligong Mountain has been in a relatively lagging state.
Located on the side of Gaoligong Mountain, Dulongjiang is a unique natural complex, which is a rare "treasure land" for the symbiosis, convergence and evolution of various animals and plants, which has always been yearned by Chinese and foreign botanists.
In the 1990s, there was no road access here, it was poor and closed, and the mountain roads in and out of the Dulongjiang River were stuck to the steep cliffs like centipedes, and they could only walk one way for 3 days, and if they accidentally stepped on the air, they might fall into the valley and die. Every year from October to May, heavy snow closes the mountain, and it is almost isolated from the outside world.
In October 1990, before the closure of the mountain, as one of the major national fund projects, Li Heng, 61, and three other expedition members appeared on the road leading to Dulongjiang Township and began an eight-month plant wintering expedition. Although some people have entered the Dulongjiang River to collect specimens before, they are all in the dry season.
For this expedition, she gave up her retirement life, let go of her lover who was seriously ill in bed, and even wrote a suicide note that she might never come back.
In order to comprehensively collect the plants of the DulongJiang River, Li Heng traveled to various villages on both sides of the Dulongjiang River, large and small ditches and inaccessible mountains.
Li Heng collected plant specimens in Gaoligong Mountain, Yunnan Province. Photo source: Photo by Li Rong, People's Daily
During those days, Li Heng picked specimens during the day and registered, pressed, baked, and consulted literature at night. A plant specimen, in addition to the specimen itself, also needs an exclusive plant "account" - to record the collection date, number, place of origin, growth environment, altitude and other information.
At the end of the specimen collection work, Li Heng had spent 230 days and nights in the mountains, and the baskets out of the mountains were filled with more than 42,000 specimens, and the plant "account" was filled with 33 small "ledgers".
The research results of this expedition won the first prize of the Natural Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Dulongjiang also had a complete plant list for the first time.
In 1996, when the scientific expedition to biodiversity of Gaoligong Mountain was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Li Heng was 67 years old, but every time she went on a field trip, she did not avoid hardships and risks, and she personally did it, and her peers called her "Desperate Sanlang".
In 2002, the collaborative research on biodiversity in Gaoligong Mountain in western Yunnan was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of the United States, when Li Heng was 73 years old. In the autumn of 2004, she led a 25-member expedition team composed of multinational research members to gaoligong mountain again, which lasted 32 days, achieving unprecedented success in the history of gaoligong mountain expedition, and the number of specimens collected ranked first in the history of gaoligong mountain biodiversity project.
Over the past few decades, Li Heng has collected more than 40,000 specimens from Gaoligong Mountain (each number includes 8-10 specimens), and after identification, gaoligong mountain has a total of 5133 species and varieties of seed plants, of which 383 species are endemic to Gaoligong Mountain. This information has played a very important role in biodiversity conservation and mapping out the germplasm resources. The local people called her the "Goddess of Gaoligong Mountain".
Before 1961, Li Heng was a Russian translator with a Beijing hukou. In the planned economy era, a paper transfer order, Mr. to leave Beijing to Yunnan to support the construction of Xishuangbanna Botanical Garden, as a family, Li Heng chose to follow, 5 minutes to complete all the resignation procedures.
Image source: WeChat public account "Democracy and Science"
After coming to the Kunming Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Russian language was no longer useful, and she began her life with plants.
When she went to the countryside to work, when she rested, others sat down to rest, and she went around collecting weeds and asking for a teacher to identify; when she came home at night, others had already turned off the lights and slept, and she was still studying hard under the candlelight to make up for the lack of botanical expertise. In a few years, she turned from "layman watching hilarity" to "insider watching doorway".
When he first learned about botany in his 30s, Li Heng changed his profession through diligent study, and in the following decades, he experienced running around the mountains, observing specimens in the herbarium, and collating and analyzing data in the office, turning plant specimens into scientific monographs.
Today, the 92-year-old Li Heng has a full schedule - coming to the office every day, discussing scientific research with young people, organizing fund projects, and going to the grassroots level to guide heavy building planting when time permits.
"In fast-paced times, it can be boring to insist on doing something like this, but it's also a great accomplishment to be able to figure out the plants of an area. The spirit of 'sitting on the cold bench and withstanding loneliness' embodied in Mr. Li is a very important reason why this book can be published, and it is also the most worthy of team learning. Li Rong said.
Source: Science and Technology Daily
Source: Science and Technology Daily