This award is under the International Junior Investigator and Postdoctoral Fellows Program, which enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad at research centers of proven excellence. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month postdoctoral research visit by Dr. Edward Xu Wang of Yale University to work with Dr. Hen-biau King at the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute in Taipai, Taiwan. This research, which is part of the international network of Long-Term Ecological Research sites, is to study forested subtropical ecosystems. It's primary goals are to study Pb biogeochemistry in a subtropical forested ecosystem, and to evaluate the effects of acidification on trace metal cycling. The study will provide comparative data to other types of ecosystems in the U.S. It will be a seed project aimed at stimulating larger scale cooperative research for American scientists in this region.