Recently, the China Science and Technology Exchange Center has released the funding list of the National Key R&D Program of Intergovernmental Cooperation in Science and Technology 2022. The international cooperation project "The mechanisms underlying the responses of grassland ecosystems productivity to extreme drought in China and USA (SQ2022YFE010894)", led by the Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, was among the funding list.

The project relies on the international Extreme Drought in Grasslands Experiment (EDGE; http://edge.biology.colostate.edu/), which includes 12 major grasslands across the Eurasian steppe and the North American prairie. Effects of long-term (11-year) extreme drought on grassland productivity will be examined to determine whether it is a cumulative effect or an adaptive effect. Responses of species and functional group productivity to extreme drought will also be analyzed to determine the relative contributions of species and functional groups to changes in ecosystem productivity. The American team will mainly focus on ecosystem structure, functioning and processes, and the Chinese team will mainly focus on plant functional traits.

This project is one of the first to adopt the experimental network approach to answer pressing ecological questions. The experimental network employs unified experimental treatments and will last for 11 years. Therefore, this project can systematically assess responses of major grassland ecosystems to long-term extreme drought events on a large scale, which earlier research failed to achieve due to inconsistent experimental treatments among studies and lack of long-term experiments. The adaptation mechanism of grassland ecosystem productivity to extreme drought will be revealed by examining changes in plant functional traits at the species, functional groups, and community levels, and changes in community structure. This project will lay the foundation for a better understanding of the response mechanism of major grassland ecosystems productivity in Eurasian steppe and North American prairie to extreme drought. It will also provide data support for improving response models of grassland ecosystem productivity and carbon cycle under drought conditions.

The Chinese team of the project is led by Professor Qiang Yu and Associate Professor Lijun Xu. The American team is led by Professor Alan Knapp (Distinguished Professor of Colorado State University), Professor Melinda Smith (Director of the Semiarid Grassland Research Center at Colorado State University), and Professor Scott Collins (Distinguished Professor of the University of New Mexico).