Author: 李顯營

Mountains cover 60% of Taiwan’s land area, giving it the greatest concentration of high mountains of any island in the world. In fact, Taiwan is covered by lush evergreen forest, with over 1,000 hectares of lands managed by the Forestry Bureau. However, there are only 1,100 forest rangers patrolling the vast forests of the island, which means each forest ranger needs to oversee more than one hectare of forest. “One hectare of flat land is not that big, but one hectare of forest is more burdensome as it includes mountains and rivers,” said Lai, Po-Shu, a forest ranger stationed at Taipingshan in Luodong, Ilan County, northeastern Taiwan.