The tree that almost touches the moon: a lost forest with the tallest specimen in Asia is found in Taiwan

Taiwan, ancient Formosa, preserves in its mountainous interior some of the most unique forests on the planet. On an island of about 36,000 square kilometers, specimens that exceed 80 meters in height survive thanks to a relief where 258 peaks exceed 3,000 meters and Mount Jade reaches 3,952 meters. The combination of altitude and climate favors nearly 5,000 different plant species. Around 60% of the territory continues to be covered by forest masses with about 950 million trees. Although logging carried out between 1912 and 1991 reduced a large part of the ancient forests, the most rugged areas were left out of that process. Since 2014, the “Taiwan tree seekers” group, made up of climbers, ecologists, geologists and remote sensing specialists, has been working to locate and measure these giant trees. The search for the tallest tree in Asia began more than ten years ago. The first scientific expeditions headed in 2014 to the Cilan reserve to study the well-known Three Sisters of Chilan. Although local communities had known about these trees for decades, they had never been measured with scientific methods. The largest reached 69.3 meters in height, and has a trunk close to three meters in diameter. The international impact came in 2017, when several climbers from The Tree Projects documented those specimens through photographs taken from the tops. The images showed the real size of these forests and sparked greater interest in locating even taller trees. The following expeditions moved to the vicinity of Mount Benya and the Great Ghost Lake, an enclave considered sacred by indigenous peoples. Reaching the area required walking for four days with all the necessary material. There they found that calculating heights from the ground was unreliable in forests with several layers of vegetation. The map that made it possible to locate 941 giants Given the difficulty of traveling through huge areas of forest, the researchers incorporated LiDAR technology, capable of creating three-dimensional models using laser pulses emitted from aircraft. The system allowed us to estimate the height of millions of trees spread across mountains and deep valleys. However, the relief caused numerous errors. The algorithms confused cliffs and steep slopes with exceptionally tall trees. To review these results, the project launched a citizen science campaign in 2020 in which hundreds of volunteers participated by manually analyzing the images obtained. The result was decisive. 93% of the initially selected candidates had overestimated heights. After the review, the “Taiwan Giant Tree Map” was prepared at the end of 2022, an inventory that identified 941 trees taller than 65 meters distributed throughout different forests on the island. Giant forests in Taiwan with trees taller than 80 metersDuring the Lunar New Year of 2023, the team visited the candidate that headed the new map. After traveling about 20 kilometers along a river bed and completing two days of ascent up a steep slope, the climbers reached the top to make the final measurement using a tape measure. The result confirmed a height of 84.1 meters. The specimen was named Heaven Sword of the Daan River and became the tallest tree known in Taiwan and all of East Asia. The Rukai peoples call these large fir trees "The tree that hits the moon", an expression that identifies the largest representatives of the species. Later campaigns located concentrations of monumental trees called temples of giants. Eleven specimens taller than 65 meters appeared in a single hectare and, years later, a forest formed by nearly thirty large specimens from Taiwania. In 2024, a study carried out in the Tao Tree Valley calculated a carbon density of 1,384.5 Mg/ha, one of the highest figures obtained in this type of ecosystem.