Chang, Ping, (Texas A&M U.)
This award supports a Joint Research Planning Meeting on Comparative Studies of Coastal and Nearshore Environmental Changes in the U.S. and China. The meeting will be held in Qingdao, Shandong Province, China, in October 2008. The key Chinese partners are Prof. Zousheng YANG, of the Ocean University of China; and Prof. Dunxin HU, of the Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Preliminary discussions between the TAMU and Chinese researchers have identified three priority research areas: 1) nearshore/coastal processes, 2) biogeochemical processes, and 3) climate/basin scale processes. The planning meeting will allow the participants to prepare joint research proposals on these themes. The research proposals will exploit the parallels between the Yangtze and Mississippi River basins to resolve uncertainties on the interrelated themes of coastal and ocean environments that are heavily impacted by human activity and climate variability and change. Such changes, in turn, have the potential to create widespread societal and environmental changes.
The ten participants to be supported by the NSF award include two senior faculty, two junior faculty, and six advanced graduate students and postdoctoral researchers.
The joint research proposals expected to result from this planning meeting will be relevant to societal issues shared by the U.S. and China and beyond, ranging from local and regional fisheries economies to permanent changes in global climate. In addition to the research advances, the proposals will enhance the training of coastal, ocean, and climate scientists capable of addressing critical environmental concerns at all scales of space and time.
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