By Yang Yuan-ting and Esme Yeh / Staff reporter, with staff writer for Taipei Times.
The team’s research showed that Taiwan’s giant trees store an estimated 2,220 tonnes per hectare, said Taiwan Forestry Research Institute assistant researcher Rebecca Hsu (徐嘉君), who founded the group with National Cheng Kung University to search for trees taller than 65m using light detection and ranging (LiDAR) imaging.
In 2020, the team found a 79.1m tall Taiwania cryptomerioides on Mount Tao, a mountain of the Syueshan Range (雪山山脈) spanning across Taichung and Hsinchu County.
Dubbed “Taoshan sacred tree,” it was thought to be Taiwan’s tallest tree until the team found an 82m tall T cryptomerioides in 2022, before discovering an 84.1m tree of the same species last year.
In August, Hsu led a team of 36 people, in collaboration with the Trust in Nature Foundation, to investigate the amount of carbon stored in 133 giant trees that had previously been located using LiDAR.
In the course of their research, they found that 196 trees in the area had grown in diameter, most of which were Chamaecyparis formosensis, Chamaecyparis taiwanensis, T cryptomerioides, Tsuga chinensis var formosana, Cunninghamia konishii and Pinus armandii, Hsu said.
The total carbon storage of the giant tree valley was calculated using the sample area of about 1.17 hectares, the spreading coefficients announced by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the carbon conversion factors for tree species, with tree strata, deadwood and six soil sampling points taken into account, she said.
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