A tree in Shei-pa National Park, which spans Hsinchu and Miaoli counties, as well as Taichung, is the tallest ever measured in East Asia, standing 79.1m tall, researchers said.
The “Taoshan sacred tree” (桃山神木), a cypress of the Taiwania cryptomerioides species, was found in a Hsinchu area of the park as part of a program initiated by the Council of Agriculture’s Forestry Research Institute and National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) in 2019.
Under the “Taiwan champion trees” program, researchers are documenting “giant trees” — those taller than 65m — using airborne laser imaging, or lidar, technology.
Photo courtesy of the Forestry Research Institute
Rebecca Hsu (徐嘉君), an assistant researcher at the institute, and a research team led by Wang Chi-kuei (王驥魁), a professor at NCKU’s Department of Geomatics, estimated that there are at least 941 giant trees in Taiwan, including the Taoshan tree.
After it was registered in a lidar scan in 2019, the team carried out field investigations in August 2020 to locate the tree, which grows at a spot about 2,000m above sea level.
Institute Director-General Tseng Yen-hsueh (曾彥學) said the discovery contributes enormously to giant tree research around the globe.
Photo courtesy of the Forestry Research Institute
Apart from measuring the tree’s height on location, the team also took photographs and created lidar point cloud images of it.
Hsu, Wang, photographer Steven Pearce from Australia and other team members carried NT$3 million (US$94,091) of lidar systems and tree-climbing equipment on a week-long mission last week, ascending 1,500m and descending 1,300m before arriving at the Taoshan tree.
Pearce said that it was the most challenging project he has ever taken part in, as he had only four days to complete his photography work in wet and humid weather, and rough terrain, and had to rely on Hsu to translate.
It took the team two minutes to pull a camera rig to the top of the tree and 12 minutes to slowly lower it as it took 450 photographs, he said, adding that the process was repeated 20 times.
Setting focus and exposure proved challenging, as brightness is high at the top and low at the base, he said.
Pearce took the photos using exposure bracketing — where multiple images are captured with different exposure settings — and has to adjust and combine 9,000 of them to display the tree in full, he said.
Taiwan’s forests “are some of the most beautiful” he has ever seen and the ecosystem around the canopy is “as rich as a garden,” he said.
The Tasmanian native said that there are many giant trees where he is from, so hopefully Taiwan and the Australian state can form a “big tree island cooperative ” to promote eco-tourism.
Hsu used an expression of the Rukai people to describe what she thought.
It is “a giant tree that can hit the moon,” she said.
Hsu said that Wang’s regional lidar scan indicated that there might be trees taller than 80m upstream on the Daan River (大安溪), but the team has to wait until January or February to investigate, as it would be easier during the dry season.
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