Faculty Projects City by City
Brief descriptions of ongoing projects (organized by city) are included on this page and on the pages listed at left. For additional information about individual faculty members' backgrounds or research interests, please visit the "ASU Faculty in China" link.
Inner Mongolia
ASU faculty have worked with colleagues at the Institute of Botany in the Chinese Academy of Sciences for the past few years on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF). Their combined aim is to provide an ecological basis for understanding and achieving grassland sustainability. Since 2004 they have been able to secure more than 1 million US dollars from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation of China to establish the world's largest BEF experiment in the inner Mongolian grasslands. They conducted their first field campaign in the summer of 2005 The experiment was designed by an international team which consisted of Jianguo Wu and Jim Elser from ASU, Shahid Naeem of Columbia University, and a dozen Chinese PIs. Wu, Elser, and Naeem have recently submitted a proposal to NSF which requests roughly 1.2 million dollars to support the participation of the US team in this exciting experiment.
