Innovative researches are a fundamental pursuit of CAF. For a long run, CAF has been applying the strategy of overseas expertise introduction to enhance its capacity in developing innovative researches and attain the goal of sustainable forest management. Based on the needs for disciplinary development and scientific and technological innovations, CAF initiated the team building for international cooperation and innovation in 2008 by engaging internationally well-famed overseas forest scientists in CAF’s scientific researches, who may allocate a certain period of time to work with CAF scientists to realize an obvious improvement of research capacity and expertise in the holistic disciplinary area, accomplish research goals, and internationalize the scientific achievements accomplished by these teams. So far CAF has successively established a total of 30 teams and now 27 of them are still in effect, covering forest tree genetics and breeding, desertification control, forest ecology, forest management, remote sensing, silviculture, chemical processing of forest products, biomass materials and renewable energy, and so on. These teams work based on a triennial timeframe and performance appraisal will be carried out against their development goals and evaluation indicators. During 2011 and 2013, a total of 11 teams were appraised as excellent and thus were granted with additional support. The team building has attained the preset goals and remarkable achievements. A total of 132 SCI articles (research reviews) were published in 2013 solely, with a highest IF 6.91, among which, 5 articles’ IFs are above 6.0 and more than 20 articles’ are above 3.0. In addition, CAF is dedicated to the building of discipline-based international and innovation teams, i.e. by clustering teams in same disciplinary area and engaging a number of overseas scientists in the due area to build up a macro-disciplinary team, aiming at the holistic improvement of innovative research capacity at a large scale through synergetic team coalitions.

Joint field work by overseas expert and CAF scientist

Overseas scientist gives a lecture for CAF researchers and students

Overseas scientist gives a lecture for CAF researchers and students

Field work by overseas scientist