The seventh annual meeting of IAWA-China Group was held at Lin-an city, Hangzhou, China on November 28-29, 2020, organized by the Zhejiang Agricultural and Forestry University (ZAFU), sponsored by IAWA, IUFRO (5.16.00 and 5.06.00) and IAWS together.The former Editor-in-Chief of IAWA Journal Pieter Baas, the President of IAWS Yoon-soo Kim, and the Coordinator of IUFRO Division 5 Pekka Saranpää gave their welcome speech by video.

 
More than 160 representatives from 50 related universities, research institutes, forest products inspection centers and wood companies attended the meeting. The theme of the meeting is “Strengthening the protection and utilization of forestry resources, broadening the research fields of wood anatomy and wood science”. There were five keynote lectures and 48 oral presentations presenting their current research progress on plant ecology, dendrochronology, environmental science, xylem formation, wood quality, wood identification, wood and fiber utilization, and archaeological wood.Keynote lectures included “Regulation of plant hormone interaction on wood formation”by Xinqiang He of Peking University, “Wood Utilization in the Neolithic age from perspectives of archaeological sites in southern China”by Guoping Sun of Zhejiang Archaeological Research Institute, “Differential responses and adaptions of xylem anatomical characteristics of Fraxinus mandshurica to rapid warming in warm-dry and cold-wet environments”by Xiaochun Wang of Northeast Forestry University and “Application of Softwood Retrieval System in Wood Identification” by Jian Qiu of Southwest Forestry University and “Wood and bamboo fiber glue-free gluing technology and industrialization”by Chunde Jin of ZAFU.The Excellent Presentation Awards (EPA) of the IAWA-China Group were awarded to10 qualified students at the closing ceremony.The hard copies of special edition of IAWA Journal 2020: 41(4) on wood identification “Advancing Wood Identification-Anatomical and Molecular Techniques” were sold in advance during the meeting. 

 The abstracts (both in English and Chinese) of this IAWA-China Group annual meeting are available online under the downloads menu of the IAWA website (http://iawa-website.org/en/Downloads/Publications/index.shtml). The next IAWA-China Group annual meeting will be held in 2021, at Sichuan Agricultural University, Chengdu, China.