His colleagues were swatting deer flies and chatting about the moss and microbes under their feet, but their English, soil ecologist Fung Hu of Nanjing, China, acknowledged, was proving difficult for him.
And so Fung, 51, trailed behind, photographing the vast, windswept meadow in the New Jersey Pinelands where they all stood.
"Very sandy soil," he observed.
Indeed. And that's about all many New Jerseyans know of the 1.1 million-acre ecosystem known as the Pinelands.
But to members of the international Soil Ecology Society, who toured its meadows, bogs, hummocks, and hilltops Wednesday, the "barrens" of New Jersey are anything but.
"Astonishing," marveled Phil Murray, a researcher from southwest England. "We don't have anything like this in the U.K."
"Amazing," said Sindhu Jagadamma, 41, an Indian-born soil ecologist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/l..._Pinelands_excursion.html#JcMkOIqRhtI3y63U.01
And so Fung, 51, trailed behind, photographing the vast, windswept meadow in the New Jersey Pinelands where they all stood.
"Very sandy soil," he observed.
Indeed. And that's about all many New Jerseyans know of the 1.1 million-acre ecosystem known as the Pinelands.
But to members of the international Soil Ecology Society, who toured its meadows, bogs, hummocks, and hilltops Wednesday, the "barrens" of New Jersey are anything but.
"Astonishing," marveled Phil Murray, a researcher from southwest England. "We don't have anything like this in the U.K."
"Amazing," said Sindhu Jagadamma, 41, an Indian-born soil ecologist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/l..._Pinelands_excursion.html#JcMkOIqRhtI3y63U.01
