Nature reports on a study from China that found thousands of endangered trees growing on the grounds of religious monuments across the country:
It is an example of “where ecological and spiritual values converge”, says study co-author Yongchuan Yang, a conservation researcher at the College of Environment and Ecology at Chongqing University in China. Several species, including Ginkgo Biloba, are sacred in Buddhism and Taoism, and have been protected from human activities that have led to a decline in tree numbers outside temple walls.
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Yang and his colleagues used national inventories to compile a database of 46,966 trees that are more than a century old and are present in human-dominated landscapes, including 5,125 Buddhist and 1,420 Taoist temples. Of the 534 species represented, 61 are classed as threatened — these threatened species accounted for nearly 6,000 trees on the list. Moreover, eight tree species were found only on temple grounds.
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You can read more of Yang’s research here, in Current Biology.