A Global Classroom

Studying Land Use and Global Change in China




Erle Ellis will be carrying experience, and a new set of high-tech instruments, into the Chinese countryside, where he is analyzing how changes in traditional farming patterns have caused profound alterations to village ecosystems. In the process, he'll begin to frame questions about the earth's ecological future, and offer some UMBC undergraduates opportunities to join him in China.

With the support of a five-year, $800,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Ellis, an assistant professor of geography and environmental systems, will be returning to China during the next several summers to expand upon his earlier study of long-term changes in the bio-geochemistry of farmland in some of China's most densely populated agricultural regions.

By comparing the crops planted, types of fertilizers used, and land management techniques of pre-industrial China in the 1920s and 1930s to the current state of village farming, Ellis and his Chinese collaborators hope to plot the changes in soil, water, and air chemistry, revealing specific ecological impacts wrought by agricultural modernization.

Many of the technologies Ellis is packing in his bag weren't available, or didn't even exist, when he last conducted field research in China in the mid-1990s. (Ellis has spent several years living in China, becoming fluent in language and adept in working with, or around, the Chinese bureaucracy.) "Now we're armed with better tools," explains Ellis, such as high-resolution satellite images now available commercially, the latest Global Positioning System equipment for precision mapping, and even newly declassified U.S. military aerial photographs of China taken during WWII. "It's very exciting," says Ellis, "the degree to which this changes the rules."

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