Mr Daping Xu was born on March 15, 1964, at Wuwei, Anhui, P.R. China. He got his bachelor degree in forestry in 1984 at Nanjing Forestry University, and then worked in Research Institute of Tropical Forestry, Chinese Academy of Forestry. His early study was selection and cultivation of Australian fast growing broad leaf trees in China, especially eucalypts. To improve his research skill and capacity, he studied in Murdoch University, Australia on improving productivity and sustainable management of eucalypt plantations in China in January, 1998, finish his PhD study in July 2001, and returned to China as a research professor. He is also the first to find boron (B) deficiency in eucalypt trees and use B to balance fertilization in China. His studies in water use in eucalypt plantations found that eucalypt plantations used less water in south China than other countries due to smaller vapor pressure deficit, smaller leaf area index and less soil water supply on mountainous and hilly forest land in south China.

Since 2002, he found that resources of high value tropical timber would be depleted soon globally if the trend of harvesting these tree species in natural forest was not changed. He widely collected genetic resource of tropical valuable trees, such as Dalbergia odorifera, Pterocarpus macrophylla, Aquilaria sinensis and Santalum album for tree breeding, and focused on studying the technique for plantation establishment of these species and heartwood formation of these valuable species. Now growth of these tree plantations is more than 3 times of that in natural forest and heardwood formation can be adjusted. It is highly likely that timber of these high value species can be supplied by plantations instead of natural forests before 2025 in China. He published more than 80 papers and 4 books.