Guangzhou 2018

Guangzhou, China
Greg's former postdoc Minxia Liang invited us to visit her at Sun Yat-sen University.  We've had collaborations with the lab of Professor Shixiao Yu for a number of years (where Minxia is a research scientist), and this was an opportunity to learn about what the students there are doing, give talks about our research, visit one of the nearby ForestGEO research plots, develop a couple collaborations, and eat lots and lots of great food.

Wednesday 27 June 2018. 

We flew from Shanghai to Guanghzhou, and Xubing Liu (another collaborator associated with the Yu lab) picked us up.  We got settled into the hotel on the main campus of the Sun Yat-sen University.  After an evening stroll on the path along the Pearl River, Minxia took us out for a boat tour on the Pearl River, with brightly lit boats and an even more brightly lit skyline.


Thursday 28 June 2018.

Darwin at Sun Yat-sen University

Met with some grad students to talk research, and Eli went off with a grad student Ivy for the day of riding all the roller coasters (including one with an essentially vertical drop) at the Chimelong Amusement park, and then at night for a circus.  We headed out to the East Campus of SYSU and gave back-to-back research talks. Unlike most places we'd give talks, there were dozens of people working on disease ecology, maintenance of diversity, and phylogenetic ecology in forests - areas really close to our themes.  That meant the kind of questions we got were much more challenging than we would usually get, which was much fun!


Friday 29 June 2018. 
Eli headed off with Ivy again to the Chimelong safari park, and Greg and Ingrid had a day-long workshop with all the grad students of Prof. Yu, Xubing, and Minxia, talking about their research.  So much exciting work on disease, mycorrhizae, and plant diversity-ecosystem function in that lab group.

Yu lab at Sun Yat-sen University

As in Shanghai, bikes are everywhere, including public use bikes and tricked-out bikes with rain bibs and attached umbrellas.  



Saturday 30 June 2018. 

20-ha Dinghushan

A bunch of grad students and postdocs took us to the 20-ha ForestGEO plot at Dinghushan.  
So much fun to walk through a sister plot to the UCSC FERP and meet the director. 

Thousand-person pot to throw wish ribbons into

The plot is actually built around ancient Buddhist temples, which is a bit trippy, and is really steep. Thousands of visitors to the temples, walking up the road, and there is just a gated path off the road in to the plot. The botanizing was fascinating -- it was a generous blend of California, Panama, and Australia; the dominant trees were Fagaceae, but with nasty recurved-spined palm vine Calamus that brought back nightmare memories of Cape Trib, and then melastomes and pipers in the understory.   Major heart- and butt-rot happening on the dominant Castanopsis, part of major dynamics in the forest structure.