Photo: CCTV

Chinese and Vietnamese botanists have jointly discovered six new species of Aspidistra plants from southern China and northern Vietnam, the Guangxi Institute of Botany of Chinese Academy of Sciences announced on Monday.

The newly discovered species include four from South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and Southwest China's Guizhou Province - Aspidistra dentata, A. dissecta, A. dongxingensis and A. anlongensis - as well as two from Ba Be National Park in northern Vietnam - A. longibracteata and A. backanensis.

The new findings have been published in the international botanical taxonomy journal Phytotaxa.

Aspidistra is one of the monocotyledon genera with the richest diversity in floral structures, giving it great scientific value. Beyond research, these plants hold significant potential in horticulture, land-scaping and medicinal applications, as reported by the China News Service.

The China-Vietnam border region is known as a center of Aspidistra diversity and evolution. Since 2019, a team of researchers from the Guangxi Plant Diversity Research and Innovation Team has been collaborating with Vietnamese botanists to conduct biodiversity surveys in the karst environments of the region. Over the years, they have collected various Aspidistra species and after extensive analyses and comparison, they identified six new species.

Lin Chunrui, a member of the Guangxi Plant Diversity Research and Innovation Team, told the Global Times that one of the distinctive characteristics of these plants is that their flowers grow close to the ground, often covered by fallen leaves, making them difficult to spot during fieldwork. 

"The leaves of the new Aspidistra species are strikingly similar. Some are slender like orchids, while others are elliptical, making visual classification challenging. This also shows the limits of the evolutionary diversification of the genus," Lin explained.

According to the China News Service, Aspidistra belongs to the family Asparagaceae and is distributed across the subtropical and tropical regions of East Asia. China is home to the highest diversity of Aspidistra species, with Guangxi being the most species-rich region. The Guangxi Institute of Botany has so far published 63 new taxa.

Lin noted that three decades ago, there were only eight or nine known species of Aspidistra in China. The renowned Chinese botanist Li Guangzhao documented 68 species in his monograph and the number of the species worldwide has now surpassed 240. To differentiate between them, researchers collaborated with the South China Institute of Environmental Science on molecular studies and maintained close exchanges with the Institute of Ecology and Biological Resources of Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology.

Due to the morphological similarities among these plants, potential new species are often cultivated and observed in bloom before being formally identified, a process that also contributes to ex situ conservation efforts. The researchers are currently establishing a seed bank for further study.

"This is a rapidly diversifying genus, and many new species are continually being discovered," Lin said. 

"With improved transportation infrastructure, cross-border collaboration has become easier, facilitating further discoveries and enhancing our understanding of biodiversity."

Lin added that China has very special species, and now research is extending northward from Guangxi to Central China's Hunan and Hubei provinces, while Vietnam is expanding southward. Although teams are pursuing different directions, they are maintaining close communication and collaboration.

Notably, all the newly described species are endemic to southern China and northern Vietnam. Except for A. dongxingensis, which grows in non-karst environments, the other species are exclusively found in karst habitats. Lin noted that these discoveries have provided critical material for studying the biodiversity, origins and evolution of karst ecosystems.

Furthermore, Guangxi and Guizhou are currently working together to establish the Southwest Karst National Park in China, where plant classification and field investigations are a primary focus.