EENR Students Study Climate Change in China

From May 21th to 29th in 2013, a group of eight undergraduate students from Rutgers University visited China on an expedition to explore climate change impacts and adaptation. The group was led by DEENR Professor Dr. Ming Xu, who maintains a strong research program on climate change adaptation in China. The trip was fully funded by a USDA-NIFA International Science and Education Grant to Dr. Ming Xu and Dr. Bingru Huang, a professor in the Rutgers Department of Plant Biology and Pathology.

The first stop was at Lanzhou University in Western China where the students attended a workshop on the impacts of climate change held in the College of Atmospheric Science. The Dean of the college, Professor Jianping Huang, met the group and introduced relevant research projects on climate change adaptation in arid and semi-arid regions. Three other speakers also presented their work on water resources management, lithic vs. plastic mulching agriculture, and biodiversity conservation under a changing climate. The group also visited a water-saving reforestation project and a research station in Dingxi City, about 2 hours from Lanzhou. During the visit the Rutgers students had the opportunity to interact with Chinese students and researchers.

Then the Rutgers group flew to Beijing to taste the flavor of urban culture and witnessed forest management practices for carbon sequestration in the suburbs of Beijing. Finally, the group took a high-speed train to Yucheng Ecological Research Station in Shandong Province where they saw a number of experiments simulating climate change impacts on various crops. They also visited many cultural landmarks, including the Yellow River, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, and the Beijing Olympic Park.

First year graduate student Dan Clark also spent the summer in China working with collaborators at the Sichuan Forest Inventory and Planning Institute. Dan was involved in a project that studied drivers of soil carbon patterns in China. The result of this project was an explanatory model of soil carbon across all of China. Dan and his collaborators determined that changing land-use is among the most important factors in changing the expected pattern of soil carbon. Their work is being used to build a climate model for China that will be used to inform environmental policy for the rapidly growing country.