Passion for plants takes photographer worldwide

In his first post on his public WeChat account, Zhou Xinxin declared: "I have a dream. I want to be the person who photographs the most plant species in the world one day."

Within the country's community of botanists and ardent plant enthusiasts, few would consider this dream to be unrealistic, as current public data indicates that the 43-year-old has already photographed more plant species than anyone else in China.

In July and September last year, Zhou updated all the plant photos he had taken on the Chinese Field Herbarium and the Plant Photo Bank of China, the two largest plant image websites in China. CFH is run by the Chenshan Botanical Garden in Shanghai, and PPBC by the Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

On both websites, Zhou ranks first in the number of plant species photographed, with 16,421 on CFH and 16,430 on PPBC.

In fact, he told China Daily that on iNaturalist, an international online social network where members discuss biodiversity, the person with the highest number of photographed plant species has captured fewer plant species than him, so he might already rank first in the world.

"My aspiration is to genuinely rank first worldwide," he said."So I made the choice to broaden my botanical explorations to include other countries. For example, I visited Malaysia earlier last year."

During this year's Spring Festival, he spent 23 days exploring Vietnam, and then in May, he made a 15-day trip to Turkiye. At present, he is participating in a plant survey in the Xizang autonomous region. Next month, he will head to South Africa for 20 days.

"I now plan to visit all of the world's floristic regions and take photos of all families of the world's vascular plants in the next 20 years," Zhou said.

Currently, there are about 400,000 species of vascular plants in the world, grouped into approximately 13,000 genera and more than 400 families.