Dear
ENTS,
I want to share with you pictures and a few parts of my trip
diary from my
trip to the Far East. I was fortunate enough to participate in
the
International Dendro Fieldweek in Mongolia, which was pretty
cool. What
might be of more interest to ENTS regulars was my trip to China
after the
fieldweek in Mongolia.
I had a planned collaboration with Dr. Qi-bin Zhang of the Tree
Ring Lab
of the Institute of Botany and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
I had hoped
to sample in a mixed-mesophytic forest similar to the southern
Appalachian
Mtns. We were told there were not many old trees in that part of
China, so
my trip was moved to the Sichuan Province in southwestern China.
The field
work was based in Dujianyuan City northwest of Chengdu. This
area is the
border of the Sichuan Basin and the eastern edge of the Tibetan
Plateau:
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/china_rel01.jpg
We cored for 10 days at 2000-5500' elevation in the subtropical
evergreen
vegetation zone. On Qin Chen Shan the dominant trees cored were
Castanea
henryii [which was ironically delicious] and Platycary. The
species name of
Platycarya is still unknown as in my hosts were unsure of the
exact species.
They are still determining the species [there are so many
species in this
region that the botanists seem to learn families first and then
work to
genera]. Among the more interesting species we saw on this
mountain was
Phoebe hui, which is in the Laurel family.
At the second mountain, Longxi Honkou Preserve, we cored Acer
spp.,
Lithocarpus spp. and Rhododendron spp. The Rhodo were small tree
sized! I
was amazed. We saw many other familiar genera: Betula, Fagus
and, in one
location, Tilia.
At the botanical gardens at low elevation I saw all the genera I
was
looking for: Nyssa, Aesculus, Liriodendron, Magnolia,
Liquidambar, etc...
and learned many new ones. At the high elevation botanical
garden [~3000'?],
I saw a tree with the genus Toxicodendron!! I didn't touch it.
It reminded
me of a Juglans with red rachii. Scary, but cool stuff [I am
highly allergic
to T. radicans]. I was told they had 300 species of Rhododendron
at the high
elevation botanical garden and many more in the forests of
Longxi.
Anyhow, a picture is worth 1000 words, so please enjoy a
selection of my
pictures: http://people.eku.edu/pedersonn/AsianExplorations/
I also have some short video clips from the field here:
http://people.eku.edu/pedersonn/moo/
There are short video clips from the Wolong Preserve where the
giant panda
is studied. These files are quite big, I think:
http://people.eku.edu/pedersonn/moo/
I will have more stuff, related to eastern N.A., for ENTS
tomorrow [or so].
Neil
|