A strong k-edge-coloring of a graph G is a mapping from E(G) to {1, 2, . . . , k} such that every pair of distinct edges at distance at most two receive different colors. The strong chromatic index χ s (G) of a graph G is the minimum k for which G has a strong k-edge-coloring. Denote σ(G) = max xy∈E(G) {deg(x) + deg(y) − 1}. It is easy to see that σ(G) ≤ χ s (G) for any graph G, and the equality holds when G is a tree. For a planar graph G of maximum degree ∆, it was proved that χ s (G) ≤ 4∆ + 4 by using the Four Color Theorem. The upper bound was then reduced to 4∆, 3∆ + 5, 3∆ + 1, 3∆, 2∆ − 1 under different conditions for ∆ and the girth. In this paper, we prove that if the girth of a planar graph G is large enough and σ(G) ≥ ∆(G) + 2, then the strong chromatic index of G is precisely σ(G). This result reflects the intuition that a planar graph with a large girth locally looks like a tree.A Vizing-type problem was asked by Erdős and Nešetřil, and further strengthened by Faudree, Schelp, Gyárfás and Tuza to give an upper bound for χ s (G) in terms of the maximum degree ∆ = ∆(G):Conjecture 1 (Erdős and Nešetřil '88 [16] '89 [17], Faudree et al '90 [18]). If G is a graph with maximum degree ∆, then χ s (G) ≤ ∆ 2 + ∆ 2 2 .As demonstrated in [18], there are indeed some graphs reach the given upper bounds.By a greedy algorithm, it can be easily seen that χ s (G) ≤ 2∆(∆ − 1) + 1. Molloy and Reed [28] using the probabilistic method to show that χ s (G) ≤ 1.998∆ 2 for maximum degree ∆ large enough. Recently, this upper bound was improved by Bruhn and Joos [8] to 1.93∆ 2 .For small maximum degrees, the cases ∆ = 3 and 4 were studied. Andersen [1] and Horák et al [22] proved that χ s (G) ≤ 10 for ∆(G) ≤ 3 independently; and Cranston [13] showed that χ s (G) ≤ 22 when ∆(G) ≤ 4.According to the examples in [18], the bound is tight for ∆ = 3, and the best we may expect for ∆ = 4 is 20.The strong chromatic index of a few families of graphs are examined, such as