China unveiled its first digital platform dedicated to tropical biodiversity on International Biodiversity Day on Thursday, offering global access to over 90,000 verified species records. The "Xishuangbanna biodiversity platform," developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, is now globally accessible. The platform showcases the region's rich ecological heritage.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) unveiled the 2025 catalogue of biological species in China on Thursday, documenting a total of 162,717 species and infraspecies, including dragonflies and earthworms for the first time. "Biodiversity is the foundation of sustainable development, and a species catalogue reflects the richness of a country or region's biological resources," said Ma Keping, deputy director and secretary-general of the Biodiversity Committee of the CAS.

A Chinese scientist has used satellite remote-sensing technology to pinpoint the source of Africa's second-longest river, the Congo River, and measured its length at 5,260 kilometers, longer than previous estimates. The Congo River, second only to the Nile in Africa, boasts exceptionally abundant water resources. Since the early 19th century, explorers and geographers have made multiple expeditions to the Congo River and its source region.

Chinese scientists have released a long-term, high-resolution dataset that tracks global cropland water-use efficiency from 2001 to 2020. Published in the journal Scientific Data, the dataset provides annual water-use efficiency estimates for croplands worldwide at a spatial resolution of one kilometer. It is expected to serve as a valuable tool for advancing sustainable agricultural water management.

S​cientists have developed a new polyurethane inspired by the red sea star starfish that can rapidly self-heal underwater, offering potential applications in robotics and medical implants. The study, recently published in the journal Macromolecul​es, was led by researchers at the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

Chinese and international scientists have uncovered a significant deterioration in global forest recovery capacity following large-scale wildfires in the 21st century, with less than one-third of affected forests able to regenerate within seven years after the fire.

Chinese scientists have mapped the 1,400-year distribution history of the Yangtze finless porpoise through an innovative analysis of classic Chinese poetry. Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Hydrobiology examined historical poems to trace the species' habitat changes, providing new insights into long-term biodiversity patterns.

Chinese scientists have discovered a new way to know how hosts and gut bacteria interact, potentially opening doors for more precise treatments for diseases linked to imbalances in the gut's microbial environment. The findings suggest that instead of simply tolerating the vast array of microbes in the gut, the host actively shapes this community, maintaining a dynamic equilibrium.

A new study led by researchers from China and the United States has unveiled a well-preserved specimen of Archaeopteryx -- widely accepted as the most primitive bird. The study discovered new details about the bones, soft tissues and feathers of the species.

​Chinese researchers have created a high-precision terrain dataset with millimeter-to-decimeter spatial resolution around the landing site of China's Chang'e-6 lunar probe. Based on this dataset, the researchers from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences determined the accurate location of the landing site of Chang'e-6 and conducted a microscale geological analysis.

Scientists from around the world are gathering in Beijing this week to address pressing challenges in climate science through cutting-edge Earth modeling and international collaboration during the Beijing node of the Global KM-Scale Hackathon.

May 12 marks the International Day of Plant Health, a United Nations initiative to raise awareness about how vital healthy plants are to life on Earth. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), up to 40 percent of global crops are lost annually due to plant pests and diseases. This not only threatens food security, but also weakens ecosystems and hampers climate resilience.

Many regions across the globe located along the Tropic of Cancer are arid deserts, yet Dinghu Mountain National Nature Reserve in Zhaoqing, Guangdong province, stands as an ecological outlier with a 98 percent forest coverage rate. As China's first national nature reserve, this primeval forest — referred to as the "Green Pearl on the Tropic of Cancer Desert Belt" — harbors 2,291 species of higher plants and 277 species of birds, and the groundbreaking scientific achievements made in the reserve have revolutionized global understanding of forest carbon sequestration.

Chinese scientists, in collaboration with international researchers, have successfully achieved high-resolution imaging of millimeter-scale targets at a distance of 1.36 kilometers, a breakthrough that opens up new possibilities for applications such as long-range, high-precision remote sensing applications, as well as space debris detection.

The 5th World Congress of Biosphere Reserves, initiated by UNESCO, will convene this September in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang Province. The event will discuss the global strategy and action plan for the next decade under the Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme, and release a global declaration named after the host city.

A team of Chinese and Australian researchers has for the first time discovered fossils of Palaeospondylus in an area located outside Scotland, according to the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

A group of Chinese scientists have jointly developed a global ocean circulation model with a horizontal resolution of one kilometer, the Science and Technology Daily reported on Thursday. The global ocean circulation model LICOMK++, developed by the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Laoshan Laboratory, enables the direct simulation of sub-mesoscale processes in the ocean.

A new study has revealed that changes in plant life had played a crucial role in speeding up major climate shifts during the late Miocene, a period that lasted from 11.6 to 5.3 million years ago. The study, recently published in the journal Science Advances, was led by researchers from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.