This award supports the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) to convene a workshop and planning visit to be held in the fall of 2008 in Beijing in order to develop research collaborations around the multi-disciplinary themes of sustainable production of bioenergy crops, land-use change, carbon sequestration, water resources and ecological restoration. The U.S. PI is Dr. Jie Zhuang, Assistant Research Professor in the Institute for a Secure and Sustainable Environment (ISSE) at UTK. The Chinese counterparts are Dr. YU, Guirui, Professor at the Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research (IGSNRR), Chinese Academy of Sciences and Dr. JIANG, Guibin, Professor at the Research Center for Eco-environmental Sciences (RCEES) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, both located in Beijing.
The proposed workshop follows a September 2007 workshop and a newly formed partnership between the UTK, IGSNRR and RCEES under the auspices of the China-U.S. Joint Research Center for Ecosystem and Environmental Change at UTK. The joint workshop is expected to catalyze new research relationships among partner institutes on ecosystem processes and management, environmental sustainability of bioenergy production, ecological foundations of water resources, and technologies for improvement of eco-environmental systems.
In addition to research, the workshop is expected to spur the establishment of a mechanism to bring students and junior researchers into cross-cultural, international research addressing bioenergy and environmental change. Other than UTK, the workshop includes a mix of U.S. representatives from Dartmouth, Purdue, the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The workshop includes five graduate students with related research interests.
