Some college students in the city of Jilin, Jilin province, employed a novel way of labeling the rare trees in the city using a quick response (QR) barcode so that interested people can scan the code with a cell phone to learn more about these interesting trees.

About 30 volunteers from Jilin Agriculture Science and Technology College's Sunshine Volunteer program used the system, June 19–21 as part of a larger ecological project, "Recording the earth", which Baidu Encyclopedia, China's largest online search engine, developed to tell tourists more about plant rare species and encourage environmental protection.

The students chose the AAAA Songhua Lake Nature Reserve and their university campus, where there is a wide variety of rare species and large visitor flow, for the first applications of the program. They sifted through the details of each tree and sent the information to Baidu Encyclopedia where they made the QR code for each tree, after which the students used their Dragon Boat holiday time to carefully label more than 400 trees.

One of the volunteers, Tian Gege, said he was happy to contribute his time and effort to protecting the earth and hoped he would get more chances to volunteer for this type of work.