Recently, the 2016 annual report on intellectual property for forestry in China (hereinafter) was released. The report made an overall summarization of the main progress and achievements in the field of forestry intellectual property in 2016.
According to the report, the State Forestry Administration (hereinafter SFA)issued the SFA guidelines on implementing the outline of national intellectual property strategy, the 2013-2020 development program for national forestry intellectual property and the 2016 forestry implementation plan for accelerating the building of intellectual property power. In 2016, SFA also issued the protection list of new plant species in China (forestry sector), and there are now a total of 206 new plant species under protection.
In 2016，the Office for the Protection of New Variety of Plant under SFA received about 400 applications, and granted 195 new varieties. 52,477 related patents are available to be retrieved through the public database of SIPO, and 2 forestry inventions won the China Excellent Patent Award.
By the end of 2016, there were 2,188 applications for new variety of plants, 1,198 grants and 283,122 related patent publications. Among these publications, 151,779 are invention patents; 4,893 are from forestry research institutes, wherein 3,705 are invention patents; 14,613 are from forestry colleges and universities, of which there are 9,297 invention patents, 827 geographical indications of forestry products and 5,231 forestry software copyrights.
