HOHHOT, July 29 (Xinhua) -- North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region has planted around 800,000 hectares of forests in the Greater Hinggan Mountain over the past seven decades, local authorities said.

Since 1949, the region has insisted on carrying out afforestation mainly using native tree species and the introduced spruce, sea buckthorn and Siberian red pine, according to the local forestry administration.

The region also has developed its forestry economy to realize a more sustainable development of the local ecosystems.

Currently, the Greater Hinggan Mountain has about 10.3 million hectares of woodlands and about 8.37 million hectares of forests, with the area's forest coverage exceeding 78 percent, according to statistics from China's ninth survey of forest resources.

The Inner Mongolia part of the Greater Hinggan Mountain plans to have 1.3 billion cubic meters of living trees and 80.8 percent forest coverage by 2035.