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Another example of China’s respectable growth, despite the global economic crisis, is apparent in this month’s Fortune magazine, with its Global 500 list of the world’s largest companies. The 37 Chinese firms that made the list is all the more impressive when you consider just six companies made the list in 1998, as Worldfocus pointed out on its blog and on its television program.

In the following video clip, Fortune global editor Brian Dumaine says the increasing number of Chinese Fortune 500 companies is all about the country’s economic growth. “It’s a growth story,” he says, “and if you look at where most growth is going on, it’s not in the developed world, it’s in the developing world.”

Despite the successes of a number of Chinese companies, other developing countries in the East Asia and Pacific region are all but completely absent from the Fortune’s list. Of developing countries, only Thailand is listed with its state-owned oil and gas company, PTT Public Company Limited, which has been on the list for at least the past several years.

Last weekend a small group of us decided to drive the 8 hours or so to the Khonin Nuga (pronounced Honing Nuk) research station, northwest of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. We had a standing invitation to visit the site for years from Professor Michael Mühlenberg of Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany, and Professor R. Samiya of National University, Ulaanbaatar – who together run the station. The route took us through the town of Zuun Kharaa, the vodka-producing capital of Mongolia, and off towards the dark-green forested mountains of the western Khentii.  We saw Mongolia’s largest bird, the Black Vulture, and also the respected and graceful Demoiselle Cranes picking up grasshoppers among the wind-blown solid waste around the town. We were going to spend the night in the research station, discuss with Prof. Mühlenberg the possibility of using the site as a training center within the forest landscapes project we are preparing, and find time to explore the taiga forest and steppe by horse. And then we were going to do the bumpy ride home again.

Instead, we found ourselves facing a major forest fire. (Continue reading after the jump)

I was never too great with numbers or math. I guess you could call me a visual learner. Which is why I was intrigued after exploring Gapminder.org. The non-profit organization behind the website says it's dedicated to "unveiling the beauty of statistics." They attempt to do this with impressively interactive and animated graphs. The cool part is in the Gapminder World, which visually displays a wealth of statistics "about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels." Their goal is to make the data, which comes from organizations like the United Nations and World Bank, accessible and understandable by anyone.

The key is seeing how different parts of the world have changed over time. After setting and comparing data based on a wide range of variables, you can hit Play, setting into motion the bubbles (each of which represents a country or more specific location) that float around the axes as the years change.

I'm in the north of Guangxi in southern China feeling privileged to be working in such a dramatic karst limestone landscape and part of another great project team. The conical and vertical towers of limestone jut out of the flat agricultural land, sometimes in single sentinels and sometimes in great families of jagged, pointed peaks, no two alike. At Mulun National Nature Reserve which abuts the Maolan World Heritage Site in Guizhou, there is nothing but these towers, and this is one of the sites getting detailed attention within our Integrated Forestry and Conservation Development Project. One sub-component of the project is directed at cave biodiversity. In that regard, we recently made some remarkable discoveries at Mulun.

As I have mentioned in an earlier blog post, cave biodiversity gets appallingly little attention relative to its significance. It is surely the most unknown of the terrestrial ecosystems, and it makes me drool to be close to places for which so little biological information is available.