Invited by Professor NI Jian, Professor Colin Prentice, Professor Sandy Harrison and their PhD students, WANG Han and LI Guangqi, from the Department of Biological Science, Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia visited SKLEG of IGCAS from 12-13 November 2012.

The visitors presented wonderful lectures entitled “The global carbon cycle: models, isotopic tracers, and data-model comparisons” (Professor Colin Prentice), “Evaluating model simulations using palaeoclimate data” (Professor Sandy Harrison), “Modelling vegetation changes in China” (WANG Han) and “Precipitation scaling with temperature in warm and cold climates: an analysis of CMIP5 simulations” (LI Guangqi), respectively, in the lecture hall of the SKLEG.

Colin Prentice is a world top scientist of Earth System Science (vegetation modeling and global carbon cycle). He was at the University of Bristol and Leader of the UK National Environmental Research Council Program QUEST (Quantifying and Understanding the Earth System) during 2004-2009, a founding Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Germany (1997-2003), and Director of the Department of Ecology, Lund University, Sweden (1991-1998). He pioneered the development of global vegetation models and was awarded the EGU Milutin Milankovitch Medal for his “outstanding contributions in modeling the terrestrial biosphere as an interactive component of our Earth system” in 2002. In his lecture, he introduced the components and their interactions of the Earth’s carbon cycle system, as well as the impacts of human activity on this system. He further summarized recent achievements of carbon cycle and climate system interaction, especially the influence of future climate scenarios on global carbon cycle.

Sandy Harrison is also a very famous scientist of palaeoclimate and palaeovegetation study. She introduced the benchmarking research of the CMIP5 and evaluated the model simulated climate scenarios in the last glacial maximum, mid-Holocene, historical period and doubled CO2 concentration.

WANG Han briefly summarized her PhD thesis, which is the modeling of China’s vegetation and net primary productivity based on a great amount of observations and the prediction of vegetation responding to future climate changes.

LI Guangqi talked about the precipitation scaling with temperature from historical to future climate change scenarios.

The four lectures have broad and deep overviews of new international research, which trigged great interests of scientists from the institute.

After the lectures, some professors at SKLEG discussed with Prof. Colin Prentice and Prof. Sandy Harrison about the future cooperation of carbon cycle and modeling of karst ecosystems in southwestern China. Later they had an excursion of subtropical and tropical vegetation in Guizhou and Yunnan provinces.

Lecture of Professor Colin Prentice

Lecture of Professor Sandy Harrison

Lecture of WANG Han

Lecture of LI Guangqi

(By NI Jian)