"Plant Hunter" Yang Zongzong: A pure "plant man"
Everyone is familiar with plants, but how many plants can you name and know their characteristics? But there is such a "true flower protector" who gave up his stable job and went to deserts, Gobis, glaciers, and canyons to record and discover the wild plants in Xinjiang that were on the verge of becoming endangered. This "plant hunter" is Yang Zongzong. When he was in middle school, Yang Zongzong collected a strange plant scattered in a mountainous area at an altitude of more than 2,000 meters. The flowers are very small and dense, with egg-shaped sepals and spoon-shaped petals. He went home and looked through various plant books, but could not find any relevant documentation. Later, he discovered that the rare and endangered species orchid mentioned in a botanical magazine was very similar to the plant specimens he collected.
"Plant Hunter" Yang Zongzong discovered a new domestically recorded plant at the age of 14.
So he wrote a letter, along with the specimen, and sent it to Professor Chen Xinqi of the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences. A month later, Professor Chen wrote back, confirming that this was a newly discovered species, "Little Flower Bird's Nest Orchid." Professor Chen admired his discovery very much and encouraged him to write an article and submit it. Yang Zongzong wrote an article "The Little Flower Bird's Nest Orchid Was Discovered for the First Time in my country" and participated in the National Youth Science and Technology Innovation Competition through his school and won the first prize in the country. In the same year, he won the only first prize in the first "Yangtze River Little Scientists" award event organized by the Ministry of Education, China Association for Science and Technology and the Hong Kong Li Ka-shing Foundation.
The post-80s uncle became a "plant hunter": drilling into the Xinjiang Gobi Canyon to pursue the "lost plants" on the earth
When he was a freshman in high school, Yang Zongzong participated in the biology competition and won first place in the Xinjiang division of the "National Middle School Biology League". In his second year of high school, he was recommended to the School of Life Sciences of Beijing Normal University. Unfortunately, due to his partiality in subjects and his difficulty in keeping up with work, he decided not to study any more plants in the second semester of his sophomore year. After that, he began to transform into a fitness instructor and open a gym. Until one day, when grandma was moving, he saw the 68th volume of " Flora of China ". That night, Yang Zongzong opened the book wrapped in brown paper.
Entering the desert, climbing mountains and descending canyons, "plant hunters" are "obsessed" to protect plants
In 2016, with the encouragement of friends, Yang Zongzong decided to start studying plants again. Yang Zongzong, who regained his "old love", began to conduct in-depth investigation and research on the plants of Xinjiang. All year round, following the flower calendar, he would go wherever the flowers bloomed. He bought several large stacks of white cardboard for making specimens and went to the mountains to collect specimens every weekend.
In those years, Yang Zongzong went to take pictures of Xinjiang tulips and found many people digging them. He told them that the white bulbs contained colchicine, which could lead to poisoning if eaten too much. But they said, "What tulips ? These are wild vegetables. We have been eating them for many years." Many people don't know much about plants, and they also lack awareness of some endangered species. Yang Zongzong realized that studying plants could not just be immersed in the wilderness and study, but also needed to face the crowd.
Yang Zongzong makes plant specimens in the studio
In 2017, Yang Zongzong founded the "Natural Li" Botanical Society. Faced with the fact that some residents generally do not pay attention to plants and environmental issues, and are "incomprehensible" about endangered plants, the "Ziranli" public welfare organization has solved the current problems of plant protection and ecological environment protection through in-depth investigations on the mountain, promotion of plant science courses, establishment of plant databases and research activities.
Yang Zongzong visited Wang Wencai, a Chinese plant taxonomist and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
004 later, Yang Zongzong's team began to plan the "Illustrated Book of Wild Vascular Plants in Northern Xinjiang" - this was the first time in the 24 years since the establishment of the National Science and Technology Academic Works Publishing Fund that it supported the writing of books by private individuals. They conducted a comprehensive combing of wild vascular plants in northern Xinjiang, filling the gap in the comprehensive survey of large-scale plant resources in Xinjiang.
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Yang Zongzong believes that only by understanding plants first can we protect them. In order to popularize plant science more intuitively, he built his short video account into a plant protection communication platform, and it became a hot search. He said frankly: "I do Douyin science popularization just to awaken everyone's understanding of plant protection. Only by improving everyone's understanding of species and improving the scientific literacy of the people can we fundamentally solve the problem of protection." For him, recording and sharing the life history of these plants is not a responsibility given by others, but his own choice. Although he has not embarked on an academic path, he is still convinced that he is the one chosen by the plants. (Yao Chunhua)
