Deep in Taiwan’s misty mountains, researchers have confirmed the tallest tree in the country: a thousand-year-old fir tree higher than a 20-story building, which they’ve named “the heaven sword of the Da’an River.” Climbers scaled the tree and dropped a measuring tape from the top to the forest floor during the Lunar New Year holiday in January 2023. The tree measured 84.1-meters (276-feet). The findings have been published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. A team of ecologists, geologists, remote-sensing specialists, professional climbers and Indigenous people that calls itself the “Taiwan tree seekers” began the search in 2014. “The common characteristics [of the team] are probably that we are all tree lovers and like adventures,” Rebecca Chia-Chun Hsu, lead author from Division of Forest Ecology, Institute of Taiwan Forestry Research, told CNN. ‘The Heaven Sword’, Taiwan’s tallest tree, measures 84.1 meters. Photo courtesy of Steven Pearce. Taiwan is one of the few places on Earth where trees can grow this tall. The island sits where the tropics meet the subtropics, and its mountains host several giant conifer species. The species behind the new record, Taiwania cryptomerioides, is known to the Indigenous Rukai people as “the tree that hits the moon.” Although nearly 60% of Taiwan is covered in forest, loggers cleared much of the island’s old-growth forest between 1912 and 1991. However, its steep slopes were too dangerous to reach, and pockets of ancient forest survived. Still, finding the tallest tree amid the rugged terrain was a task. Taiwan…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Indigenous Peoples in Voluntary Isolation and Initial Contact (PIACI) in the Yavarí-Tapiche Territorial Corridor, one of the largest contiguous, intact forests in the Amazon and home to the world’s highest concentrations of PIACI, are under threat by extractive and large-scale industrial activities, which pose an existential threat to its inhabitants and the ecosystems they depend on. This is according to a new report co-authored by Earth Insight, the Regional Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the East (ORPIO), the Coordination of the Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB) and the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP). The report finds that oil and gas blocks overlap with 10% of the 16-million-hectare (39.5-million-acre) corridor, including almost 1.7 million hectares (4.2 million acres) of intact tropical moist forest, 907,000 hectares (2.2 million acres) of Key Biodiversity Areas and 713,000 hectares (1.8 million acres) of protected areas. “Pressure from hydrocarbons is increasing on the Peruvian side of the Yavarí Tapiche corridor,” Edith Espejo, senior program manager at Earth Insight and author of the report, told Mongabay over WhatsApp messages. “Our report serves as a warning for the irreversible harm that could take place if these oil blocks move into this corridor. Mining concessions within and on the peripheries of the corridor also pose a threat of encroachment and contamination of waterways.” A critical corridor for ecosystems and Indigenous communities The Yavarí-Tapiche Corridor covers Brazil’s western border states of Amazonas and Acre and Peru’s Loreto and Ucayali departments in the Amazon…This article was originally published on Mongabay