Planning Visit to China and Workshop Involving Two Marine LTER Sites and Two Chinese CERN Sites Concerned with Coral Reefs

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Planning Visit to China and Workshop Involving Two Marine LTER Sites and Two Chinese CERN Sites Concerned with Coral ReefsThis award supports a two-week planning visit and joint research workshop to be held in Sanya, Hainan Island, China, in August 2010. The related visits will include stops at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, the Jiaozhou Bay National Marine Ecosystem Research Station in Qingdao, and the South China Sea Institute in Guangzhou, as well as the Hainan Tropical Marine Biology Research Station in Sanya. Participants in the trip will be six senior researchers from two marine-research sites in the NSF LTER (Long Term Ecological Research) network. Both Chinese research stations, members of the Chinese Ecological Research Network (CERN), as well as the US participants from the Santa Barbara Coastal LTER and the Moorea Bay Coral Reef LTER are members of the International LTER network. The purposes of the trip are to plan for the formation of an East Asia Coral Reel Alliance involving Sanya with similar stations in Taiwan, Australia, and Moorea and to promote collaborative US-China research on temperate reefs. The objective of the workshop is to focus on a joint geographic study on reef resilience. The visits and workshop will promote valuable collaboration and provide opportunities for comparative studies among various ecosystems. The resulting work will facilitate testing of hypotheses regarding the effects of local and regional diversity patterns on ecological processes and responses to environmental drivers such as climate change. One form of broad impact will derive from opportunities for participation of students and young researchers from both countries in the planned collaborations. Their interactions, among themselves and with the more senior researchers, are expected to establish long-term relationships that should encourage productive research collaborations. In a broader sense, better understanding of reef resilience and local ecological phenomena should lead to methods for remediation and control of reef destruction, a serious environmental problem.