With more than 70 participants from China, Japan and Korea, the CarboEastAsia Meeting 2007 was successfully held from 30th November through 1st December 2007 at the Institute of Geographic Science and Natural Resources Research (IGSNRR), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing, China. This meeting is the first annual meeting of the Asia A3 Foresight Program “CarboEastAsia: Capacity building among ChinaFlux, JapanFlux and KoFlux to cope with climate change protocols by synthesizing measurement, theory and modeling in quantifying and understanding of carbon fluxes and storages in East Asia”, which is one of the two Asia A3 Foresight Programs co-funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), and Korea Science and Engineering Foundation (KOSEF) in 2007.

The meeting opened with the welcome address by Prof. Xiubin Li (Vice-Director of IGSNRR, CAS) and an opening speech by Dr. Yinglan Zhang (Chief of Asian-African Division, Bureau of International Cooperation, NSFC), who gave a brief introduction to the history of Asia A3 Foresight Program and hoped a fruitful success in the CarboEastAsia program through 3-year close cooperation and communication among ChinaFLUX, JapanFlux and KoFlux communities.

The first day (Nov. 30) is the academic seminar open to the public. More than 10 keynote speeches were presented by scientists from China, Japan and Korea. Many participants joined the wide and deep discussion on the key issues about flux observation, process interpretation, up-scaling and regional modeling of carbon and water cycles in East Asia. During the seminar, Dr. Wei Wang, from Peking University, introduced another A3 Foresight Program “quantifying and predicting terrestrial carbon sinks in East Asia”. It was suggested that both A3 programs have many common research foci, implying the potential for a close program-to-program correspondence and cooperation.

The second day (Dec. 1) is the close-door business meeting for CarboEastAsia A3 program members. In the morning, they are divided into four groups following the sub-project activities of the program, and discussed separately research plan and tasks in 2008. Topics of the four sub-projects include (1) inter- and multi-disciplinary joint field investigation, (2) net-working flux measurements (inter-site comparison), (3) model development, parameterization and validation, and up-scaling and integration efforts, and (4) seminar and science meetings. In the afternoon, these four groups joined together and respectively presented their results of the morning discussion. Through the general discussion based on the reports from four sub-project groups, the program members came to agreements on several cooperative activities in the following three years, including holding the annual seminar, workshop, field campaign, and publications (a book and special issues) of results yielded from this A3 programs.

By Guirui YU, Yuling FU and Shenggong LI (Research Center for Ecosystem Network)

more: http://www.chinaflux.org/en/index/index.asp