The 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15), held in Kunming, China, is the first global conference of the United Nations on ecological civilization. On Oct.12th, President Xi Jinping said by video link that China establishes the first group national parks. They are the Three-River-Source National Park, the Wuyishan National Park, the Giant Panda National Park, the Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park, and the Hainan Tropical Rainforest National Park.

(Photo/Xinhua)

Themed “Ecological Civilization: Building a Shared Future for All Life on Earth,” COP15 will set new goals for global biodiversity conservation by developing the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework.

(via China Daily)

Before and during COP15, CCTV, Xinhua News Agency, Guangming Daily and other media intensively reported on the outcomes of the Tiger and Leopard Research Team of BNU, gaining over a hundred million views.

Tigers and leopards are the top species in the ecosystem food chain and play an important role in maintaining ecosystem balance. Over the past 100 years, the world's wild tiger population and habitat have decreased by 95%, which has drawn governments’ great attention. At the same time, tigers and leopards are important parts of Chinese culture, and China is also one of the main distribution areas of tigers and leopards in history. By the end of the last century, however, wild tigers and leopards in China were on the verge of extinction. Whether there are wild north-east tigers and leopards in China remains a mystery.

In order to provide scientific guidance for the restoration of Chinese tigers and leopards, the BNU research team marched into the forests in northeast China in 2005, and has been carrying out arduous investigation and research of 16 years, having gained a series of important outcomes on biodiversity. The team finally revealed the population and survival of wild northeast tigers and leopards in China, and found that the populations are facing a key opportunity to return to their hometown China. The outcome was selected as Springer Nature's 2016 world-changing paper. “This will be the world's most successful tiger conservation story in the next 20 years,” commented Science.

BNU has been approved to build the Northeast Tiger and Leopard Monitoring and Research Center of the National Forestry and Grassland Administration (NFGA), the Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park Conservation Ecology Laboratory of NFGA, and the Northeast Tiger and Leopard Biodiversity National Field Science Observatory. With the strong support from BNU, NFGA and Jilin Provincial Government, the field scientific research and experimental building, the ecological monitoring data center and a number of field science observation sites which in total takes 4000 sqm, have landed in the National Park and Hunchun, Jilin Province. The integrated monitoring system of Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park, developed by BNU, has become the first real-time monitoring system in the world to achieve large-scale coverage of biodiversity. At present, the research on biodiversity of the northeast tiger and leopard has formed a comprehensive scientific platform to serve the key demand of the national ecological civilization construction.