Ecology

The discipline of ecology was established in 1952, and was approved to confer the first batch of doctoral degree in 1981. It was designated as one of the first national key disciplines by the Ministry of education of China (MOE) in 1989, and also as national key discipline in 2001 and 2007 by MOE. In the year of 1985, the state forestry administration owned Xiashu forest ecosystem research station was established, followed by the establishing of key laboratory of ecological engineering in 1995. The setup of “Jiangsu provincial key laboratory of forest ecological engineering” was approved in 2005, and “advantageous discipline of biology” was approved in 2009. The discipline of ecology has been approved to co-construct south forestry modern forestry collaborative innovation center with discipline of forest in 2011, and also national forestry experimental teaching demonstration center in 2013.  The postdoctoral scientific research workshop for ecology was setup in 2001, the discipline of ecology was also promoted as the class-one doctoral discipline in the year of 2011 and was selected as Jiangsu provincial class-one key discipline. Then in 2015, it was also designated as key discipline by state forestry administration of China.

Currently, there are 50 full-time faculty members working in discipline of ecology, where 76% (38) have senior titles, the youth staff (less than 45 years old) accounts for 70% (35) of total, and 88% (44) have the doctoral degree, 64% (32) of them graduated from universities or institutions outside of Nanjing Forestry University. Two professors were selected in thousands of talents plan-Youth Program, and one professor in 333 high-level talent training project, two experts are the members of the discipline evaluation group of the State Council, one was selected as Young and middle-aged experts with outstanding contributions in Jiangsu Province, there are three Jiangsu provincial distinguished Professor. Many world-renowned experts well up successively such as Wenyu Xiong, Fengxiang Xu, Zhilin Jiang, Jingzhong Ye, Wenli Lin, Benlin Zhou, and the discipline of ecology also cultivated lots of famous scholars such as Xiaoming Zhou, Han Chen, Fangliang He, Gaofeng Wang over the world.

The discipline of ecology operated 10 provincial and ministerial level platforms including Jiangsu Provincial Joint Center for sustainable Forestry in Southern China (Platform for ecological restoration and environmental protection), it also operated 6 university level platforms such as carbon accounting and monitoring center for Forestry in Southern China. Within most recent 5 years, More than 80 million RMB has been invested in discipline construction, among them 68 million was in advantageous discipline of biology, 12 million in central and local common constructing laboratories, with the rest of  8 million  in key disciplines construction funding,  the ecology lab has bought many modern instruments including NMR spectrometer, elemental analyzer, gas chromatograph. The lab owns 68 instruments with price more than 500 thousand RMB, It has played an important supporting role in undertaking major scientific research projects at the national and provincial levels.

In recent 5 years, we have host more than 60 scientific projects varied from provincial to national natural science fund,  these include one sub-project of the national basic research program of China (973 Program), 4 important national science and technology projects,  2 forestry public welfare profession of China. 22 national natural science foundation of China (NSFC), with total project founding of 60 million RMB, wining 4 prizes named as advance of science and technology. Our staff members have published 138 science citation index papers including on Nature, Nature Communication, Global Change Biology, Soil Biology and Biochemistry,  and more than 200 papers on Chinese core journal, besides, they published 5 textbooks and monograph, and were authorized 10 invention patent and software copyright commercialization of scientific research and achieved tremendous social and economic benefits.

Since the very beginning, we have enrolled 171 PhD candidates and post-doc researchers, and 509 master students to 2019. Among them 139 have received doctoral degree and 412 have received master degree.  For the PhD students all lectures are tough in English, and 30% specialized course are tough by bilingual teaching. More than 36 students have studied overseas or attended international scientific conference. 8 graduate students got national scholarship, and there are 2 excellent doctoral dissertation of Jiangsu Province, and 7 excellent master’s dissertation of Jiangsu Province.