2025-10-12 18:00
publication
2025-10-12 18:00
Due to global warming, China, the largest tea producer in the world, expects an increase in the area of land suitable for growing this plant, but this may lead to ecological conflicts – reports the magazine “PLOS One”.
Tea leaf infusion (Camellia sinensis) is – after water – the most popular drink in the world, and China is the world's largest producer of tea. Tea bushes are usually grown in monoculture plantations and require humid conditions, which makes them very sensitive to climatic fluctuations.
In the context of prolonged drought and global warming in recent years, it has been crucial to investigate whether the natural distribution of tea bushes is changing and whether human-driven expansion of tea cultivation may encroach on forest areas, potentially leading to the loss of valuable forest resources.
The research was conducted by Chinese scientists from Southwest Forestry University in the southwestern Yunnan province, famous for tea, which borders Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar.
14 climate, topography and soil variables were used to build five models – Random Forest (RF), MaxEnt, Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and LightGBM.
The best-performing RF model was selected to simulate current and future crop-suitable habitats in the southwestern region, southern China, and the Jiangnan and Jiangbei regions.
According to modeling using artificial intelligence (AI), the areas suitable for tea cultivation in China will increase and their border will shift north. The current habitat area in the four major tea-producing regions reaches 3.44 million square kilometers, accounting for 86.84 percent of the total tea-growing area. It is mainly distributed in warm, humid regions with favorable ecological conditions.
Under future warming scenarios, suitable habitat for tea is expected to shift northward, with significant increases in suitability in the Jiangnan and Jiangbei regions, expansion in the southwestern region, and stable patterns in the southern China region. This expansion may increasingly overlap forest areas in the southwestern region and Jiangbei, indicating an increasing risk of ecological conflict.
Paweł Wernicki (PAP)
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