Abstract:

Northeast China Transect (NECT), one of the fifteen International Biosphere-Geosphere Programme (IGBP) terrestrial transects, has been established for 10 years by Prof. Zhang Xin-Shi, through a core project of the IGBP — the Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems (GCTE). This transect is located in the mid-latitude semi-arid region, ranging 42-46°N latitude and 110-132癊 longitude. The primary driving force for global change is precipitation and the secondary one is land use intensity. Research progresses have been performed during the past decade in the following aspects: ecological database development, climate and its variability, ecophysiological response of plants to environments, vegetation and landscape changes, biodiversity patterns and their changes, plant functional types and traits with relation to climatic gradient, productivity and carbon dynamics, pollen-vegetation relationship, trace gas emissions, land use and land cover changes, as well as biogeographical and biogeochemical modelling. In order to achieve the higher level of integrated research, the NECT needs the consistent basic data sets within the same framework, further field experiments and observations, integrated simulations of vegetation structure, process and function from patch, landscape to biome scales, intercomparisons of results and simulations within the transect and to other IGBP transects, multidisciplinary research, national and international co-ordinates, and full scientific plan and implementation strategy.

Key words: biodiversity, carbon cycle, climate change, CO2, land use change, vegetation modeling, precipitation gradient, plant functional types