Grad students Jiwei Li and Changjiang Ye are conducting summer research in Beaver Island, Michigan with Dr. Qian Yu. They are working on an NSF funded project to understand terrestrial carbon leaching from land to lake or ocean. The experiment uses aquatic mesocosms and green house incubation at Central Michigan University Biological Station to simulate litter leaching process. The result will provide different decomposition rates for dominant vegetation types and examine the bio-optical properties of dissolved organic carbon.