The 2010 annual general meeting for the project “Mechanism studies on occurrence of Cyanobacterial Blooms in Large and Medium-sized Lakes” which is under the authorized National Basic Research Program (also called 973 Program) was held in Wuhan during Dec. 26 and 28. 13 experts from the consultancy panel of the project, expert panel, the competent department of the project as well as experts from the Date Archive and Sharing Network of 973 Program were invited to attend the meeting.  

The project “Mechanism studies on occurrence of Cyanobacterial Blooms in Large and Medium-sized Lakes”, launched in 2008, passed the mid-term review in 2010. The 2010 annual general meeting mainly aimed at reviewing the progress made for the past year, checking the implementation of the project and discussing the directions the project will take in the next three years. The chief scientist Prof. SONG Lirong from Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IHB), together with other principal investigators reported the general progress achieved so far. The expert panel suggested that in the next two years, the project team shall try to 1) make more breakthroughs in some key scientific issues; 2) enhance collaboration between each project and integrate achievements of each project; 3) adopt a theoretic approach that both combines mocro and micro perspectives. In view of the issues and suggestions put forward by the expert panel, the project team thus convened a symposium in the hope of fulfilling the suggestions and putting forth reasonable schemes for solving the existing problems in the project.  

The project “Mechanism studies on occurrence of Cyanobacterial Blooms in Large and Medium-sized Lakes” was launched shortly after the breakout of the cyanobacterial blooms in Lake Taihu, a large lake in the Yangtze Delta plain, on the border of the Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. The overall goal of the project is to reveal the adaptability of cyanobacterial bloom in the ecological environment and its biological basics in the formation of competitive advantages by studying the nutritional metabolism, population adaptability, intrinsic regulatory mechanism of vertical distribution and anti-cold stress mechanism of cyanobacterial blooms. By studying the overwintering and recruitment mechanism as well as the rapid reproduction and accumulation mechanism of cyanobacterial blooms in various hydrological and meteorological circumstances, the project team elucidated the collaborative function of key regulatory factors in different phases of the development of blooms, discriminated and concluded the quantitative relationship between temporal and spatial variations and cyanobacterial blooms. The project team studies the regional ecological rules of the breakout of cyanobacterial blooms and the relationship between the breakout of cyanobacterial blooms and eutrophication process, finds out how human activities and global climate changes induce natural disasters, e.g. the breakout of cyanobacterial blooms. Revealing the biological and ecological mechanisms of the breakout of cyanobacterial bloom in large and medium-sized lakes provides a scientific basis for forecasting and prewarning the breakout of cyanobacterial bloom, helps to establish the theoretic system of ecological technology that controls cyanobacterial bloom, and facilitates the progress of putting forth strategies to prevent and control cyanobacterial bloom. The project also provides scientific basis for the strategy of water ecological security.