Stephen J. Walsh, a full research professor from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, conducted cooperative research work with Prof. DAI Erfu, who works at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research (IGSNRR), Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS), with period from 3rd September to 2nd October, 2012.

Prof. ZHOU Chenghu, deputy director of IGSNRR, conferred the certificate of Visiting Professorship for Senior International Scientists to Stephen J. Walsh

Prof. Stephen J. Walsh has participated in more than 110 projects from NASA, NIH、USGS and NSF, also published over 200 papers in international scientific journals, and issued over 10 monographs. He mainly engaged in the field of natural geography, geographic information system, human-environment Interactions, remote sensing application and spatial analysis. Recent years, he applied the models of Agent based models (ABM) and cellular automata (CA) to simulate the land use /cover change, and obtained a series of major achievements.

For this time, both sides will probe into the comprehensive evaluation of the influence of climate and land use change on regional ecosystem, which is funded by the National Program on Key Basic Research Project of China (973 program) titled “Function Evaluation and Structure Optimization of Plantation Ecosystem” undertaken by Prof. DAI. Within one month’s staying at IGSNRR, Stephen J. Walsh and DAI Erfu draw the initial research plan on the study of the influence of climate and land use change on Chinese typical ecosystems.