international collaboration nets years of research in China’s rainforests
COA botany professor Susan Letcher and Chinese Academy of Forestry colleagues link land-use history and drought to forest carbon in Forest Ecology and Management.
"Building those networks, maintaining those networks, doing the kinds of collective projects that would be hard or impossible to do as a solo researcher... It's such a rich part of the experience of being a scientist" — Dr. Susan Letcher.
Letcher, the College of the Atlantic Elizabeth Battles Newlin Chair in Botany, is a co-author of a paper in Forest Ecology and Management that grew out of a 17-year collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Forestry. Researcher Ruiming Cheng of the academy is the lead author.
For "Land-use legacies and drought exposure affect aboveground carbon dynamics along elevational gradients in tropical forests of China," the team tracked the carbon stored in trees across 22 one-hectare plots on Hainan Island, from lowland to mountain forest. Some plots are old-growth forest. Others are recovering from shifting cultivation, clear-cutting, or selective logging. The researchers measured the trees in three censuses between 2010 and 2021, covering a humid period and a drier one. Both kinds of forest gained carbon overall, but in different ways: Degraded forests gained mainly through tree growth, while tree deaths drove losses in old-growth forests. Carbon gains slowed in the drier years, and forests with more tree species held up better under drought.
The collaboration began in 2009, when Letcher peer-reviewed a manuscript by Yi Ding, PhD. Ding contacted her after reading her comments. In 2010, she joined the team in Hainan for its first census of woody plants. The range of forests she saw, from wet lowlands to cloud forest and from old growth to land once cleared for farming, made a lasting impression on her as a scientist. Since then, she has worked remotely with Ding and a changing team of researchers and students on several papers about these forests.
"The international scientific community is such a wonderful group of people. I really appreciate being a part of that," Letcher said. "Building those networks, maintaining those networks, doing the kinds of collective projects that would be hard or impossible to do as a solo researcher... It's such a rich part of the experience of being a scientist."
In todays divisive political climate, Letcher said, she draws hope from the teamwork and trust between scientists around the world. Like the forest, our world is built on shifting ground, she said, but investing time into growing connections across political lines makes us stronger.