A SOUTH Lakeland microbiologist was invited to share his expertise with a country which is struggling both to conserve water and keep it clean from pollution.

Professor Gwyn Jones, of Oldfield Road, Windermere, was asked to advise the Chinese Academy of Sciences on water quality and control at an international conference, which attracted up to 100 delegates.

With the aid of the British Executive Service Overseas, Prof Jones attended the gathering to discuss, among other problems, the polluted City River running through Shijiazhuang, 300 kilometres south west of Beijing, and advised on drawing up an improvement programme.

"The river is pretty awful and they need to clean it up," explained Prof Jones, an honorary research fellow with the association.

"The city council has, without consultation, treated the river directly by doing what they should be doing in a waste treatment plant.

They have added poisons and wiped it completely of what little life there was left."

Prof Jones, a retired director of the Freshwater Biological Association, developed a thirst to return to China after making considerable waves on a previous visit towards solving a problem of blue-green algae which was making the waters undrinkable.

During his latest visit, he also travelled to Inner Mongolia where forest areas, 50 times the size of Grasmere, have been hand-planted to combat the growing formation of deserts.

Further north, overgrazing is wiping out surface vegetation and turning meadows into desert in an area which only has about 60 frost-free days in the year and 44cm of rainfall in just a month.

Following his visit, Prof Jones said that plans had been made for workers to stop hand planting during the wet season, to create a larger forest area by sowing the land from aeroplanes.

Farmers will be allowed to buy their farms if they convert it to good quality meadow land, he explained, and will control grazing on the meadows by moving cattle around.