There are 316 kinds of national protected plants (including 153 kinds listed on the Appendix of CITES) in the Three Gorges Area, according to Li Zhenyu, researcher of the Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, on the annual academic conference of 2012 on November 2.
According to Li, the Three Gorges Project is the largest irrigation works over the world thus it has significant meaning to explore and catalog the plant kinds there. From April 2007 to December 2009, four teams of CAS collected more than 35,000 plant samples in the Area.
Kuang Zhou