Yuefengdao Ecology Station

Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University Yuefengdao Ecology Station (XYES) is a field research station co-established between the Department of Health and Environmental Sciences (HES) and Yuefengdao Organic Farm, located between water source protection areas – Kuilei Lake and Yangcheng Lake.

China is undergoing rapid development and urbanization and there is an increasing focus on studying the economic, quality of life and environmental changes associated with urbanization including at several research centers at XJTLU. However, rural areas are changing as rapidly as urban areas because a declining, increasingly older, population, and large changes in agriculture and land use. With the declining rural population, farms are growing bigger, or are purchased by mega-corporations, which leads to intensification, mechanization, and monocultures. Marginal farmlands are increasingly abandoned. With these changes also come environmental changes, as these large monoculture farms homogenize the landscape leading to a decline in biodiversity. Larger farms also have higher fertilizer use than traditional crops and the increased focus on high value products, such as aquaculture, leads to increases in chemical use. These changes do not stay isolated in rural areas, and the currently poor water quality in Jiangsu is for a large part caused by aquaculture and agricultural chemical and fertilizer use. How to achieve food security but also maintain sustainable agricultural development has been raised as one of China’s national strategy. Organic farming is a one of the option that achieve sufficient food supply in a sustainable way, which also has significant cultural and natural values and great potential for tourism. However, studies from interdisciplinary agricultural/social/cultural/natural perspectives are lacking.

Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University Yuefengdao Ecology Station (XYES) allows us to have the opportunity to study current multifunctionality of rural areas and its environmental changes, start an interdisciplinary research program that is innovative in China in documenting these changes, and develop an understanding of the linkages between changes and its drivers.

HES and Yuefengdao Organic Farm have been cooperating for many years. Previously, they jointly released a number of research outputs such as “Bird Diversity Survey”. They have officially signed a memorandum of understanding on field station construction. As the first field station of the School of Science, it will carry functions such as environmental monitoring, teaching practice and public science popularization.