The six-year efforts of southwest China's Yunnan Province to increase its forest coverage have paid off, statistics show.

Dubbed the "kingdom of plants," Yunnan invested 6.7 billion yuan (US$810 million) in planting 790 million trees in the past six years, with its forest coverage rate increasing to the current 50 percent from 44.3 percent in 1998.

Yunnan launched a project to protect local natural forest in 1998 and many former lumberjacks turned to planting and protecting trees.

The province harnessed 12,646 square kilometers of soil-eroded land by planting trees over the past six-year period.

Currently, the province has established 144 nature reserves, accounting for 7.6 percent of its total land area of 394,000 sq km.

Yunnan is home to over 30,000 species of plants, of which more than 17,000 are higher-elevation plants, or nearly half of China's total. A total of 151 kinds of rare plants in the province are on the state protection list.

According to 1985 figures, the province had 9.5 million hectares of forested area, or 7.8 percent of the national total and accounting for 24 percent of the province's total land space.

(Xinhua News Agency May 13, 2004)