While EU researchers are currently operating in a low-mobility environment due to covid-19 restrictions in many countries, our Chinese colleagues are taking tentative steps to return to normality, with some adjustments to keep the experimental campaign proceeding.

Gang Liu of Beijing Normal University re-located to the Jiusan soil conservation experiment station located in Heilongjiang province since mid-April, working with local farmers to ensure sowing of a maize/soybean rotation since the first week of May (see images below). Suhong Liu and Yun Xie’s planned field experiment for AquaCrop model calibration was changed from Xinjiang to Hebei province to align with the graduate student’s home town.

Sowing on runoff plot with 1 degree steepness.

Sowing on runoff plot with 5 degree steepness.

  Sowing on ridge tillage cropland.

Sowing on no-till cropland.

Checking seed density and depth.

Meanwhile, Weifeng Xu and colleagues of Fujian Agricultural & Forestry University have managed to plant a rice experiment at Sanming City, Fujian Province, investigating the impact of alternate wetting and drying irrigation, as part of a long-term data set (see images below).

Rice seedlings growing.                                            1 day after transplanting.                                  30 days after transplanting.

Thus progress is still being made in the project (additional to the frenetic efforts of our simulation modelling community).