Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, (CAS)
中国科学院西双版纳热带植物园

Two students from the Ecological Evolution Group, XTBG, were invited to present their work at the Student Conference on Conservation Science (SCCS) held in Cambridge, UK during 23-25 March 2010, the biggest student- oriented conservation conference in the world.   The international meeting brought together 220 students from 63 countries and included 4 plenary talks, 33 students talks, 2 poster sessions, 6 workshops and many social events.

YI Zhuangfang, the first PhD student from the Dai minority, presented a talk in the session for economics and ecosystem services. This sesion is quite new in SCCS and has begun to draw more and more attention. Yi’s talk about whether eco-compensation in Xishuangbanna is a reasonable option to convert rubber plantations back into nature forest.  As she brings together perspectives from the local community, landscape ecology, and social science, Yi seems to be the most valuable person to provide some solutions. The audience provided strong feedback on her talk and generated a lot of interesting questions.

Fan Huan, a MSc student, presented a poster on using digital technology for rapid biodiversity assessment.  This project was one of the successful student projects from the Advanced Fieldcourse in Ecology and Conservation – Xishuangbanna (see www.afec-x.ecologicalevolution.org).  Fan also got a lot of interesting feedback from her peers about the project.  Ms. Fan is actually doing her Masters work on fig genomics and this poster is a small side project.

These two students will stay in the UK for a few more weeks on invited internship with Cambridge University (Ms. Yi) and Botanical Gardens Conservation International (Ms. Fan), also supported by SCCS.  They will carry out interesting projects with their hosts and surely bring back knowledge and new ideas for their own study. It is really a precious chance for graduate students to be involved in such an exciting programme.