Donghu Experimental Station of Lake Ecosystems is a state-level field observation station for the purpose of scientific research. The station was formally launched in 1980, and soon after it became the positioning observation of “Man and Biosphere”. In 1988, it became an open field station of CAS. In 1992, it became one of the first batches of 29 important observation stations of “Chinese Ecosystem Research Network (CERN)”. In 2001, it was chosen as a pilot unit for the state key field scientific observation station. In November 2006, it passed a formal assessment, and was officially announced as the state key scientific field station.
At present, the station has a regular crew of 8 members as well as 10 other employees and 3 post-doctoral researchers. Besides, it has 52 graduate students, 22 of which are PhD students and 30 postgraduate students as well as 6 other people. It possesses a barge, laboratories, research platforms and a duty room, with a total floor space of about 800 M2. It also possesses 230 fixed instruments, including isotopic mass spectrograph, with a total value of about 9 million yuan (RMB). The station takes East Lake in Wuhan as the representative and focuses on the study of structure, function, evolution of shallow lakes as well as their sustainable development in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River.
Through 30 years of development, it has become comprehensive field station for the research of lake ecosystem with some irreplaceable characteristics and advantages in this field, and has won a very good reputation at home and abroad in the studies of long-term evolution of lakes, their eutrophication mechanisms, control of cyanobacterial bloom through biological means, ecotoxicology of algal toxins and threat of aquatic vascular plants.
In the recent decade, with ecology as its leading discipline, the station has also conducted a number of biological researches on water resources and water environment. It has, at various levels and depths, carried out long-term observation and systemic study of the structure, functions and succession of the ecosystem of lakes in fixed localities, and has conducted some controlled experiments and demonstrations relating to these studies. On this basis, it has particularly studied the process and mechanisms of eutrophication of water bodies, the counter-measures of its treatment, the degeneration of aquatic vascular plants and their restoration technology, the occurrence of toxic cyanobacteria, their ecological and toxicological effects and biological means of control, the structure and functions of compound ecological systems of lakes and rivers, etc. These studies have organically combined the long-term ecological researches on East Lake with those on the region, on the basis of which, it has also conducted investigation of the ecosystem of more than 100 lakes in the eastern plain of our country. The above studies have obtained a research fund totaling 30 million yuan (RMB), and published 200 research papers (including 170 SCI papers) and 5 monographs.
