During last week (18th – 20th, March), the LPICEA group visited Professor YE Qing in South China Botanical Garden (SCBG), Chinese Academy of Science. Professor Ye shares the common interests in plant functional traits with LPICEA group and has been working on the responses of plant eco-physiological processes and forest community assemblage to global environmental changes for many years.
After swapping ideas with Professor Ye on the key questions in plant functional biogeography, Dr. WANG Han discussed with Professor Ye on the potential collaborations in future in terms of data analysis, model development, visiting studentship and so on. All the LPICEA member visited Professor Ye’s lab and learnt to measure hydraulic traits, such as leaf conductance and xxx from LIU Xiaorong. Xiongrong is a forth year PhD student with Professor Ye. She is super good at design hydraulic trait measurement system, and shared lots of tips with LPICEA member. Her guidance allows LPICEA to have much clearer ideas on what to prepare for their fieldwork this summer. Indeed, we are going to measure HYDRAULIC traits in Gonnga soon!
Apart from enjoying the mini-course on hydraulic trait measurement, the LPICEA group also visited the botanical garden, one of the largest botanical garden in China. Our second-year PhD student, Shengchao Qiao, was so amazed by the wired plants there, as he grew up in North China Plain, covered by agricultural plants, whereas most plants in SCBG were collected from subtropical and tropical area.
One of the luckiest things during our visit is that we actually met Professor David Ellsworth, who was also visiting Professor Ye’s lab. David has been measuring plant functional traits both at natural field and FACE experimental sites for many years. We therefore visited Dinghushan National Nature Reserve, the first national nature reserve in China, together with some PhDs or postdocs from Professor Ye’s lab. We saw some transplant experimental plots, some nitrogen deposition experimental plots, and even some big trees snapped by typhoon. As botanists, we quite enjoyed identifying plant species with David, especially when recognizing that some plants could also be found in Australia and south Africa.
