The new content and trend of global change research

The paper reviewed several important issues related to global change research, including the components of global change, the advance in global change research and the new direction of global change research. The global change now refers not only to global climate change, but also to world population growth, atmospheric composition change, biogeochemical cycle change, land use and cover change, and loss of biodiversity, etc. The future global change research will center around the impact of global change on biodiversity, the effects of interaction among elevated CO 2, nutrient, temperature and water on ecosystem processes, the ecological studies of landscape level processes and human dimensions of global change.