The project of “Spatial-temporal Patterns of Environmental Changes in China during the Past 2000 Years” is supported by “Global Changes and their Impacts, Adaptation and Mitigation” in the Ecological and Environmental Sciences Innovation Base, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). It’s composed by “East Asian Monsoon Climate and its Interactions with Human Beings during the Past 2000 Years”, “Climate Change Processes and Mechanisms of Monsoon-Arid Transition Belt during the Past 2000 Years”, “Response Processes and Mechanisms to Global Changes in Temperate-glacier Regions of China”, “Inter-annual and Inter-decadal Temperature Change Processes and Ecological Responses in Coral Reefs in the South China Sea during the Past 4000 Years” and “Quantitative Study of Historical Process of Typical Lakes and Human Activities Influences over the Middle-lower Reaches of Yangtze River”. This project is led by scientist in chief Dr. Quansheng Ge, Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, and collaborated with Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology and South China Sea Institute of Oceanology of CAS together.

The main research progresses in the first executive year, 2007 are as follows. (1)The project accomplished the work plans and going forward smoothly on collecting data, constructing scientific research abilities, and has made fruitful efforts and publishing papers. (2)The project made obvious progresses on integrating and comparing different proxy data, physically and chemically testing and choosing appropriate reconstructing models and methods, selecting climatic modeling results and diagnosing relevant mechanism and reconstructing high-resolution series of Meiyu, sea-temperature changes in the south China sea etc. (3)The next step of this project will improve accuracy and error evaluation of the proxy data, physical and statistical meanings of climatic elements and publish more high-level papers on international journals with high cited index.

The future works will focus on :

(1)To discuss the relationship between the rainy season changes of the eastern China and coral reef records in the south China sea;

(2)To analyze the monsoon information in coral reef records and temperate-glacier changes;

(3)To study the methods of integrating rainy seasons, rainfall, and stalagmite, tree-ring and lake changes in northern boundary of summer monsoon;

(4)To compare the lake surface and Meiyu changes over the middle-lower reaches of Yangtze River; and mechanism diagnosis of multi-scale changes of eastern Asian Summer Monsoon with climatic modeling results; and reconstructed results from tree-rings, stalagmite and historical document records in eastern arid zone.

By Zhixin Hao, Research Center for Land Surface System