On the New Year's Day of 2025, the snow on Shennongding exudes chill, and the dry leaves of Fargesia spathacea Franch.and azalea tremble in the biting cold wind. The sky is cloudless, and the sun shines its warmth on the mountains and valleys, steaming up a light mist, which makes the Shennongjia Mountains even more mysterious.
In central China, where Shennongjia meets the Qinling-Daba Mountains, lies a landscape of verdant peaks shrouded in ethereal mist. Over a billion years, natural evolution has fostered a diverse array of landforms and a wealth of rare species.
A tiny oval-shaped creature, suspended between its eight slender legs, slowly crawls onto a leaf. Its front legs, resembling probing canes, tap here and there—tap-tap, tap-tap-tap—taking one, two, or three steps at a leisurely pace, as if blindly feeling its way forward. This slow-moving small arthropod is a Harvestman.
From November 19 to 22, 2024, Academician Zhang Yaping, Chairman of the Chinese National Committee for Man and the Biosphere Programme and former Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led an evaluation team to conduct the on-site evaluation for the second 10-year periodic review of Shennongjia World Biosphere Reserve.