The city of Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang province will be presenting its Heilongjiang Wetland Forum, on May 25, with a large display of its unique wetland resources and wetland tourist routes under a theme of sustainable development of China’s wetland tourism and Heilongjiang’s summer resorts.

The organizers have invited the Top 100 travel agencies to the forum to let them visit some of the wetland reserves and there will be a summer ecological tourism promotion fair at the same time and the Heilongjiang summer tourism mascot will make its debut.

The meeting will have three themed summer travel categories to promote -- an eastern landscape tour, forest tour, and volcanic wetland tour -- covering all of the province’s wetland types, and other events, such as wetland tourism industry salons and a field study of local wetland zones.

China has 46 internationally known wetland reserves, eight of them in Heilongjiang, which has 85 in all, according to the provincial tourism department, so it is a vital stop and breeding center for migratory birds from all over and has the world’s largest population of wild red-crowned cranes. It also has more than 500 wildlife species in its wetlands, with17 under Level-1 State protection, including the Manchurian Tiger, red-crowned crane, and Chinese merganser, and 66 at Level-2, such as the whooping swan, mandarin duck, and white-nape crane.