Outstanding Achievement Award for Prof Bob Su

Professor Bob Su received an Outstanding Achievement Award for excellent contribution to the CAS International Partnership Programme "The Basic Research for Water Issues of Inland River Basin in Arid Region." from the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), 2009.

The Heihe River Basin, an inland river basin located in the Hexi corridor of Gansu Province, was selected to study the formation of water resources in high mountains, the transformation of water resources in piedmont alluvial plain, the sustainable utilisation of water resources in inland river basin, the management of water resources in the whole basin, and environmental issues relevant to the abuse of water resources. The study was initiated in 2005 and completed in mid 2009. Thanks to the great success of the project, especially the build-up of the partnership between the domestic and overseas Chinese researchers, a new research programme ‘Integrated research in eco-hydrological processes in the Heihe river basin' is initiated by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) in 2010.

The objectives of the programme are to:

1. establish a research platform integrated eco-hydrological processes research centred at water, through integrated observation, experiment, simulation, scenario analysis and decision support
2. study ecological-hydrological processes at individual plant, plant community, ecosystem, landscape, and watershed scales and the interactions
3. quantify the ecosystem - hydrological process mechanism of inland river basins under the impacts of climate change and human activities
4. develop methods for eco-hydrological process scaling
5. develop coupled ecological, hydrological and socio-economic watershed models
6. advance the understanding of inland basin water resources formation and transformation mechanism and sustainable management
7. advance Chinese watershed eco-hydrological research into the international advanced level.

The duration of the new programme is eight years with a total budget of 150 million Chinese Yuan (app. 15 Million Euro).