An article entitled "Worldwide Evidence of a Unimodal Relationship between Productivity and Plant Species Richness" written by 62 authors from 19 countries was published In the July 17th issue of Science (Science 2015,349:302-305. ). Co-authors Dr. Long Ruijun and Dr. Shang Zhanhuan, professors from the School of Life Sciences, LZU, were in charge of studies of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau subalpine meadow in China. In 2011, the NutNet research paper with Dr. Wang Gang and Dr. Chu-Jin as co-authors was also published in Science (2011, 333: 1750-1753). All these achievements of LZU scholars in the study of the Tibetan plateau grassland ecology have been drawing attention and recognition from top international magazines and senior international counterparts.
The report is about the research results of an international cooperation project 'HerbDivNet', which is based on the research paper "Coordinated Distributed Experiments: an Emerging Tool for Testing Global Hypotheses in Ecology and Environmental Science (2013,11 (3): 147-155) ", published in the internationally renowned magazine Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, by Professor Lauchlan H. Fraser from the Thompson Rivers University, Canada in 2013, which proposed the experimental verification test for global coordination network (Prof. Long Ruijun from LZU as one of the co-authors, shared the above-mentioned research paper). The research selected 151 plots of 64 square meters in 30 study sites from 19 countries of 6 continents, analyzed the relationship between productivity and plant species richness in different grassland ranging from 1 to 64 square meters. The results validated the unimodal relationship, providing a theoretical basis to the global grass production and management. The subalpine meadow pilot site in Qilian Mountain, in the eastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau, is the only sample of the project in China. Funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the research work is mainly completed by the LZU scholars.
(Translated by Li Yafeng; proofread by Sissi Xu)
