On April 24, 2020, the kick-off meeting of the "Strategic International S&T Innovation Cooperation Key Program" entitled "the technology and equipment research program for forest and grassland fire prevention and control" was held at Northeast Forestry University in the form of a network meeting. CHANG Yu, core member of the program and researcher of the Institute of Applied Ecology (IAE), Chinese Academy of Sciences, attended this meeting. More than 30 people, including other core members of the program team and overseers of the project, attended the meeting.

The program has nine participant institutes, six at home and three abroad, including IAE, Northeast Forestry University, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Jiangxi Normal University, Northeast Normal University, Beihua University, Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory of the U.S. Forest Service, and University of British Columbia (Canada).

Researcher CHANG Yu undertook the project "the Development of Grassland Fire Early Warning Model System" wherein his researcher team plans to establish a fire risk warning model based on fuel water contents, meteorological data and other social and economic factors, and then develop a grassland fire risk rating system that supported by GIS, in order to achieve scientific and accurate forecasting of grassland fire.

CHANG Yu talked in detail the research objectives, research contents and the implementation plan of the project. The participating experts fully affirmed the designed plan of his project. The successful implementation of this project will solve the bottleneck problem regarding the low accuracy of grassland fire forecasting and will provide technical support for grassland fire prevention and control in China.