Progress 10/01/06 to 09/30/11
Outputs
OUTPUTS: PROGRESS: 2010/01 TO 2010/12 OUTPUTS: We implemented our IGERT seminar and the winter retreat (January 14-15) for the third full year. Two new issues that were addressed this year were 1) expansion of students' contacts outside the Chinese Academy of Sciences; and 2) consolidation of our "buddy" system and medical evacuation plans. The first issue was discussed due to the trainees' diverse research interests and the need to find appropriate counterparts for those interests, often at provincial level institutions (e.g. Southwest Forestry University; Yunnan University). For the latter, a couple of accidents had left students wanting to formalize our emergency contact system. During our fourth group trip to Yunnan in June, for the first time, we had a chance to visit the field sites of a number of trainees in the field conducting their research. In addition, we have continued to grow our "community of scholars" that work in Yunnan and other areas of China by inviting guest speakers to campus and through our associate awards (non-NSF small grants) to graduate students at UW-Madison and other universities. Over the past four years, we have invited a total of 20 guest speakers all of whom work in Yunnan or in China (4 in 2010). Each guest speaker spent 2-3 days on campus presenting in seminar and interacting one-on-one with our students. Also, a total of 14 small associate grants have been awarded to graduate students (5 in 2010) from a total of 8 institutions. Eight individual research grant have been awarded (1 in 2010) to help students with seed money to better develop their research proposals and a total of four linkage grants to facilitate interdisciplinary research collaborations (3 in 2010). PARTICIPANTS: 19 graduate students and 20 faculty across 10 departments. Chinese collaborators are the Chinese Academy of Sciences and its affiliated institutions: Kunming Institute of Zoology, Kunming Institute of Botany, and Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Gardens. Other collaborators include the Southwest Forestry University, International Crane Foundation, and the Missouri Botanical Garden. TARGET AUDIENCES: Nothing significant to report during this reporting period. PROJECT MODIFICATIONS: Nothing significant to report during this reporting period.
Impacts
IMPACT: 2010/01 TO 2010/12 Trainee Jill Baumgartner has finished collecting data for her dissertation exploring the relationship between indoor air pollution from biomass combustion on blood pressure among adult women and children in rural Yunnan, China. She enrolled 280 adult women and 240 children into her study and collected measurements on personal air pollution (PM2.5) exposure, blood pressure, salt intake, fuel use and energy use patterns and physical activity. Her results indicated that a one log unit increase in PM2.5 exposure results in a highly significant 2.4 mmHg increase in systolic blood pressure (SBP) among adult women. This suggests that cardiovascular disease may be an additional component of the public health burden of indoor air pollution. Prioritizing issues of energy and indoor air pollution may be a crucial policy imperative for China and other developing countries as they move forward in trying to reduce their cardiovascular disease burden. Trainee Brian Robinson is researching how villages manage their extraction of natural resources, specifically non-timber forest products (NTFPs). He compared the age distributions of wild-harvested matsutake mushrooms from 13 villages that have one of three village-level management institutions: open (public) access, common (village) access and private (household) access. Open and common access villages perform worse than the private access villages but, surprisingly, open-access villages consistently display more efficient harvests relative to common-access villages. This research shows that "open access" is not necessarily indicative of resource degradation as is commonly assumed and can be a conscious village management decision. The creation and maintenance of natural resource management institutions is costly; when villages gain little from a self-imposed institution, it is not likely to be resilient within a community. Trainee Jodi Brandt is performing a land use and land cover (LULC) change analysis of the IGERT study area using Landsat imagery. Using field data collected throughout the study area to train and validate the image analysis, she has produced preliminary classification maps for 1975, 1990, 2000, and 2009 that characterize on-the-ground patterns of LULC in this extremely heterogeneous region. The study area can be categorized into 9 LULC classes with overall accuracies of > 80%. The analysis indicates that old-growth forest loss and shrub encroachment in the alpine regions are important processes occurring in the study area. For example, old-growth forest continues to be logged at a significant rate, despite a state-sponsored logging ban since 1998. In addition, the classification maps also indicate that shrubs are increasing in the alpine region (>3800 m), at the expense of the highly-diverse alpine meadow communities.
Publications
- Yang, X., A. Wilkes, Y. Yang, J. Xu, C. S. Geslani, X. Yang, F. Gao, J. Yang, and B.Robinson*. 2009. Common and privatized: conditions for wise management of matsutake mushrooms in Northwest Yunnan province, China. Ecology and Society 14(2): 30. URL:http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art30/
- PUBLICATIONS (not previously reported): 2010/01 TO 2010/12 Behm, J. E.*, A. R. Ives, and J. W. Boughman. 2010. Breakdown in postmating isolation and the collapse of a species pair through hybridization. American Naturalist 175:11-26.
- Chaopricha, N.T.*, 2010. Review of Chinas Water Warriors: Citizen Action and Policy Change by Andrew C. Mertha; Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2008. Environmental Politics 19(1): 175-176.
- Hansen, R.L., Carr, M.M., Apanavicius, C.J., Jiang, P., Bissell, H.A.*, Gocinski, B.L., Maury,F., Himmelreich, M., Beard, S., Ouellette, J.R. & Kouba, A.J. 2009. Seasonal shifts in giant panda feeding behavior: relationships to bamboo plant part consumption. Zoo Biology 28:1-14.
- Wiedower, E., Hansen, R., Bissell, H.*, Ouellette, R., Kouba, A., Stuth, J., Rude, B. & Tolleson, D. 2009). Use of near infrared spectroscopy to discriminate between and predict the nutrient composition of different species and parts of bamboo: application for studying giant panda foraging ecology. Journal of Near Infrared Spectroscopy, 17:265.
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Progress 01/01/09 to 12/31/09
Outputs
OUTPUTS: In October, 2008, two members of our advisory committee were able to visit the campus (Dr. Ji Weizhi of the Kunming Institute of Zoology and Dr. Jack Ives of Carleton University, Ontario, Canada). Dr. Ji was instrumental in spearheading our Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program (IGERT) from the China side and was able to reflect on the origins and need for our program from the perspective of our Chinese colleagues. Dr. Ives has been working in the Himalayan region for over 40 years and provided our program with a long-term perspective on interdisciplinary projects in the region. In January, 2009, before spring semester began, we once again held a two-day retreat organized by trainees. The retreat included team-building activities, an exercise where trainees reviewed interdisciplinary proposals written by IGERT participants the previous year, interdisciplinary project brainstorming, two sessions on ethics, and an activity where each student spent time discussing their research one-on-one with every other student. The IGERT seminar continued to train IGERT participants in interdisciplinary research in spring and fall semester. The experience of our first two cohorts allowed us to focus on their research in Yunnan as the main organizing principle of the seminar. Focusing on the trainees' research achieved a number of goals: helped students learn to speak and understand across disciplines; increased their knowledge of our field site, and, allowed them to explore possible collaborations. We conducted our annual summer group trip to Yunnan, albeit a scaled-down one. The program manager spent one week with the new trainees in Kunming where we met with colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and with a number of international and domestic non-governmental organizations. At the end of June, our principal investigator spent time with the trainees in additional meetings in Kunming and on a field trip to a potential research site. Trainees stayed in Yunnan for the summer and developed research ideas through contacts they had made during the group trip and through site visits to potential research sites. During this year, four additional students made major progress in defining their PhD topics and began collecting field data. These students will be studying changing buckwheat cultivation practices, feeding ecology of the snubnosed monkey, the effect of land use changes on soil carbon characteristics and the role of village organizations on the impact of ecotourism. Our program also supported six IGERT associates to conduct research projects in Yunnan that complemented the work of our students. The associates included two undergraduates from UW-Madison, three graduate students (University of Colorado-Boulder, New York Botanical Garden, and Ohio State University), and one post-doctorate (Missouri Botanical Garden). Also we selected our 4th and final cohort of five IGERT Trainees and they joined the IGERT team in September, 2009 PARTICIPANTS: 19 graduate students and 20 faculty across 10 departments Chinese collaborators are the Chinese Academy of Sciences and its affiliated institutions: Kunming Institute of Zoology, Kunming Institute of Botany, and Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Gardens. Other collaborators include the Southwest Forestry University, International Crane Foundation, and the Missouri Botanical Garden. Also, Jill Baumgartner is working with the China CDC. TARGET AUDIENCES: Nothing significant to report during this reporting period. PROJECT MODIFICATIONS: Nothing significant to report during this reporting period.
Impacts
Timothy Hildebrandt, our IGERT program's first graduate, received a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Asian Democracy at the University of Louisville. The Center for Asian Democracy seeks to support research on the emergence of democratic institutions that is not only academically rigorously but also well-grounded in reality. Tim's training in our IGERT gave him grounding in reality unlike most of his peers in Political Science. IGERT enabled Tim to conduct his field research on environmental NGOs, which are considered an important antecedent to democracy, in Yunnan, China. Additionally, his training in our IGERT in disciplines outside political science, such as ecology, helped inform his research, helping him better understand the science and complexity of issues that these nonstate actors have sought to solve. Trainees were successful in procuring additional grants and fellowships. John Zinda had a Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship over the past year. Michelle Haynes received an NSF EAPSI Fellowship for this summer. Jodi Brandt was awarded athree-year NASA fellowship. Mary Saunders was awarded a three-year NSF Graduate Fellowship. In outreach activities, Mary Saunders presented an interactive display on the origins and production centers of some common domesticated crops around the world and presented examples of the influences of human selection on crop evolution at the UW's Darwin Day 2009. Nina Chaopricha was interviewed on 04/04/09 by Stewart Motta from the environmental NGO Green Watershed in Kunming, China about biogas feasibility for an alpine community.
Publications
- Lawrence, B.A., H. Wu, and Q. Liu. 2009. Developing an interdisciplinary restoration plan for Napahai Wetland, Yunnan, China. Ecological Restoration. March 2009.
- Ren, G., A. Zhu, W. Wanga, W. Xiao, Y. Huang, G. Li, D. Li, and J. Zhu. 2009. A hierarchical approach coupled with coarse DEM information for improving the efficiency and accuracy of forest mapping over very rugged terrains. Forest Ecology and Management 258:2634.
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Progress 01/01/08 to 12/31/08
Outputs
OUTPUTS: During 2008, Integrated Graduate Education and Research Traineeship) IGERT trainees from the first and second cohorts began their dissertation research in Yunnan, China. Research topics include the effects of land use change on amphibians, indoor air pollution and cardiovascular health, sustainability of matsutake mushroom harvest, diversity of alpine rangelands and traditional knowledge of herders, organized social groups and the Chinese state, remote sensing of landscape change in NW Yunnan and its implications for monkey and pheasant habitat, and the relationship between forest cover regrowth and ethnic groups. The IGERT seminar continued to train IGERT participants in interdisciplinary research in spring and fall semester, with our third cohort joining us in the fall. The goals of the seminar were to facilitate student and faculty understandings of the concepts of interdisciplinarity, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable development; expose trainees to the languages of other disciplines, and engage in creating interdisciplinary projects in northwest Yunnan. We conducted our second summer group trip to Yunnan in June 2008. The situation was complicated this year due to the Olympics and political unrest in Tibet, resulting in restrictions on foreigners traveling in rural areas. However, we met with colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and with a number of international and domestic non-governmental organizations, including The Nature Conservation, The Mountain Institute, Conservation International, the Center for Biodiversity and Indigenous Knowledge, and the Alpine Botanical Garden. After the three-week group trip, trainees stayed on for the summer and developed research ideas through contacts they had made during the group trip and through site visits to potential research sites. In January 2008, we held a two-day retreat organized by trainees. The retreat included team-building activities, an introduction to conducting research in China and Chinese banquet culture, a discussion of methods for gathering household information, sharing of previous trainee research experiences in China, interdisciplinary project brainstorming, and an ethics session. Conference Presentations Allendorf, T. (2008, April). Training graduate students to understand sustainable development and biodiversity conservation over a landscape in northwest Yunnan, China. In C. Drew (Chair), Landscape Patterns and Ecosystem Processes. Symposium conducted at US-International Association of Landscape Ecologists, Madison, Wisconsin. Baumgartner, J.* (March 2008). Household air pollution concentrations from biomass fuels in rural Yunnan, China. Paper presented at the Global Health Symposium at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Lawrence, B.A.* & Zedler, J.B. (2007, October). Biodiversity conservation and sustainable livelihoods: Napahai wetland, northwest Yunnan, China. Poster session presented at the IGERT Sustainability Conference, Fairbanks, Alaska. Van Den Hoek, J.* (2008, April). Spatio-temporal patterns of change in the forests of Yunnan Province, China. Paper presented at the Association of American Geographer's Conference, Boston, MA. PARTICIPANTS: The project expanded to 14 students during this reporting period. Our first cohort (arrived in 9/06) is nearly all advanced to dissertator status and their advisors have been to the field to visit their student's field sites. Our second cohort (arrived in 9/07) spent an abbreviated summer in Yunnan (travel restrictions due to Olympics and Tibet events) and is in the phase of project design. And the third cohort (arrived in 9/08) has completed their first semester in the program and are preparing for their "orientation" summer. Currently several of our students are working closely with the Xishuagbana Tropical Botanical Garden (1), The Kunming Insitute of Botany (2) and Kunming Institute of Zoology (3). TARGET AUDIENCES: Nothing significant to report during this reporting period. PROJECT MODIFICATIONS: Nothing significant to report during this reporting period.
Impacts
Applying interdisciplinary skills and knowledge learned from participating in IGERT, our students have been extremely successful at procuring China-specific funding, including two NSF East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute (EAPSI) fellowships, one summer Foreign Language and Areas Studies (FLAS) award, two annual FLAS awards, and two Fulbright awards, one of which includes a Critical Language Enhancement Award. We believe that their participation in our IGERT made them attractive candidates for multiple reasons, including the fact that they are working in a remote area of China, most have already had field experience in the area, all have had Chinese language training, and they are were able to communicate their research objectives to a general audience. A subset of trainees wrote an ultimately unfunded proposal during fall semester for the Conservation Leadership Programme sponsored by British Petroleum titled 'Protecting Alpine Meadow Biodiversity and Livelihoods in Southwest China.' The trainees were from diverse departments, including Applied Economics, Botany, Zoology, and Public Health, and also included Chinese colleagues based in Yunnan, China. They proposed an interdisciplinary project to quantify the impacts of livestock grazing on biodiversity and inform realistic policy solutions that would facilitate regional conservation while preserving local livelihoods. This experience motivated the trainees to conduct the proposal writing exercise during spring semester.
Publications
- Patz J, Olson S, Baumgartner J.* (2008). Emerging Disease and Conservation: Land-Use Change as a Driver of Disease. In K. Redford (Ed.), State of the Wild 2008-9: A Global Portrait of Wildlife, Wildlands, and Oceans (pp. 82-88). Island Press, Washington DC: Wildlife Conservation Society.
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Progress 01/01/07 to 12/31/07
Outputs
OUTPUTS: Outputs 2007/1 to 2007/12. In September 2006 we accepted six students into the IGERT Program and in February a 7th student. In September 2007 we accepted six new students but unfortunately one dropped out in November. As a result we are now have a group of 12 PhD students. We took our first trip to Yunnan with the students during June 2007 and spent one week in Kunming and then two weeks in Zhongdien. During that time we introduced the students to our Chinese hosts and they began to develop research contacts. Most of the students stayed in China until mid-July developing research contacts. In the first cohort we have students studying wetland vegetation, impact of grazing on alpine vegetation, marketing routes for matsutaki mushroom collectors, genetic diversity among frogs, effect of timbering on land use patterns, the impact of indoor air pollution on human health, and the role NGO's play in environmental governance. During the spring semester of 2007 and the fall semester
we offered our seminar course on Biodiversity in China and had a number of guest speakers as well as the students themselves presenting their thesis topics.
PARTICIPANTS: This project includes researchers from three Chinese Institutes (Kunming Institute of Botany, Kunming Institute of Zoology, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden) as well as faculty from the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Letters and Sciences, and the Medical School.
TARGET AUDIENCES: The primary goal of the IGERT is to train US graduate students who will, from their disciplinary bases in governance, livelihoods, or ecology, be able to play a leading role in the transformation of how society interacts with the environment. The IGERT will be a central component of a larger enterprise currently developing between the UW-Madison and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The IGERT faculty and students at UW-Madison will work closely with Chinese faculty and student counterparts, and the research and training initiatives fostered by the IGERT will have direct impacts on research and training in China. We plan our IGERT not only as a model for training US graduate students to perform interdisciplinary research, but also as a model for developing international research and training relationships at an institutional level.
Impacts
Impact 2007/1 to 2007/12. We have begun to develop stronger relations with our Chinese colleagues. In one case a botany professor has developed a proposal with a Chinese colleague and in another case a zoology professor will be taking a semester sabbatical at our host institute. We are hopefully that we will continue to build professional and personal links among the two faculties.
Publications
- No publications reported this period
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