This summer I have been on a research trip to the Fudan University in Shanghai China. I was invited by Prof. Jihua Wu and Prof. Bo Li to spend a month at the Key Laboratory for Biodiversity Science and Ecological Engineering.
Entrance gate to FUDAN University (Shanghai) Jiangwan Campus.
It was a very interesting trip indeed! PhD-student Zaichao Yang helped me to collect quite some cool data in the Dongtan marsh on Chongming Island (in a very short time!). Being used to our Wadden Sea marshes over here, I soon found out that the Chinese marshes are very different. The vegetation diversity is very low, there are crabs everywhere and the soil is very different, too. The soil, or to be more precise the organic carbon in the soil, was also the main focus of the study we did together. Within the southern part of the marsh, which is grazed by cattle, Zaichao established exclosures in 2014. He already collected a lot of data and compared accretion rates and the soil fauna community between the grazed and ungrazed treatment.
Grazing exclosure in the southern part of the Dongtan salt marsh.
Stefanie Nolte 