US-China Carbon Consortium (USCCC)

USCCC was established on December 16, 2003 in Beijing, P.R. China as a collaborative consortium between American and Chinese institutions that have interests in studying the role of managed ecosystems in the global carbon and water cycles.  Representatives of two US institutions (Southern Global Change Program of USDA FS and University of Toledo) and seven Chinese institutions (Institute of Botany-CAS, Fudan University, Beijing Forestry University, Chinese Academy of Forestry, Nanjing University, and Meteorology Administration of China) participate in a planning workshop held in BFU.  Other interested representatives of the ChinaFlux, University of California- Santa Cruz, Arizona State University, The Center for Forested Wetland Research of the USDAFS, Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (Germany), and several Chinese agencies also participated in the workshop.

Our overall goal is to develop a network of study sites sponsored by the above institutions in hope that data and results will be shared so that synthesis can be made at broader spatial scales to assess the importance of human influences on carbon and water fluxes in the changing climate.  An integrated ecosystem approach will be adopted to explore the underline mechanisms controlling the fluxes of dominant ecosystems in both continents.  A central piece of the research is the flux towers using eddy-covariance method to directly and continuously measures the net ecosystem exchange of CO₂ and H₂O.   Our central hypothesis is that human disturbances increase variability of C sequestration and water cycle of a landscape in time and space primarily via influencing landscape structure (i.e., composition) that directly affect the underlying mechanisms.  Further we hypothesize that human disturbance (influence) regime in US and China is significantly different, suggesting that models predicting carbon and H₂O are different.

The needs for USCCC as a team effort include at least four major reasons.  First, the lack of inter-site comparability of collection methods and sampling rates greatly hinder data comparison between eddy flux tower sites.  By standardizing or methods and working as a team, we will be better able to assess the relative and absolute abilities of the various research sites to sequester carbon (in addition to better other ecosystem processes such as water use).  Secondly, although China and the US have similar climate and soil conditions, the land use conditions and vegetative cover are very different.  We can understand the carbon sequestration potential of revegetation efforts in China but studying already vegetated areas in the US.   Conversely, we can better understand the impacts of land use change and deforestation in the US by studying similar devegetated areas in China.  Third, it is much easier to understand the driving biological controls and limitations of carbon sequestration and water use by examining a variety of ecosystems.  Individually, these studies would contribute to the scientific base knowledge, but as a group of studies, the impact will be much greater (a.k.a.  The whole is greater than the sum of its parts).   Fourth, there is an efficiency of scale regarding the cost and funding of the experiment.  For example, data management is a major consideration and expense to this work.  It is much cheaper to add an additional site of data to an existing database format than it is to establish a whole new data storage system.  Finally, these experiments are expensive and it is much more efficient to solicit funding as a group.   This way the team is not in competition, the funding agencies are not inundated with similar funding requests, and each team member needs to contact fewer potential funding agencies for support.

USCCC members agreed to use the same methods across the sites.  We will share the data, results and credits, and potential failures.  A listserv was installed to facilitate communications among USCCC members.  This consortium will not be exclusive of any other individuals, institutions, and programs but welcome those who are interested in being a partner.  The team agreed to propose a decentralized database management plan, i.e., each institution will independently manage their data.  The data will be open to all the partitioning members through project WebPages with permission of the institution.  The committee strongly encourages its members to make their data as available as possible.  USCCC will adopt the data sharing policy of Long-Term Ecological Research Networks (LTER, http://lternet.edu/data/netpolicy.html) for our future research.

USCCC will be governed by a steering committee, which include a co-chair from US and China, a coordinator, a science leader, and one representative of each partitioning institution.  The steering committee is responsible for coordinating USCCC activities.  This includes; 1) the formulation of study objectives and research questions through its annual meetings; 2) establishment and implementation of unified field instrumentation, data collection, and other sampling methods; 3) practical solutions for data quality assurance  (QA) and quality control (QC), and data storage and dissemination; 4) collaborative data analysis and compilation with the same metadata structure; 5) forming consensus on research results for publications; 5) determining authorship and approve papers prior to journal submission; and 6) settle any problems or disputes that may arise within or between sites and members.