As announced by a recent meeting of the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), a project for studies of carbon cycle & its driving mechanism in China' s land ecosystems had been officially launched.
With CAS as its backing, the Institute of Geographic Sciences & Natural Resources Research (IGSNRR) will take charge of the project and its director Liu Jiyuan would be the project' s principal investigator.
Coordinating the efforts of scientists within and outside CAS, the project will focus on issues such as the biogeographic mechanism of the time-space distribution patterns of carbon sources and sinks in China' s land ecosystems, the control mechanism of carbon cycle and its driving system of human factors, the response and adaptation mechanism of carbon cycle biological process to climate change, and the impact of land use and cover change (LUCC) on carbon storage & cycle of land ecosystem.
The findings of the project are expected to furnish a scientific foothold for the country' s eco-environmental construction, as well as for international negotiations over issues such as climate change conventions.
MOST approved the project as one of the 26 projects scheduled for the year 2002, which was included in National Basic Research Priorities Program.
