Jian ZhangSun Yat-Sen University | SYSU
Jian Zhang
PhD in Conservation Biology
I am seeking motivated postdocs in Ecology to join my lab at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou.
About
150
Publications
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
June 2016 - present
January 2015 - June 2016
September 2013 - January 2015
Education
September 2009 - November 2013
September 2007 - June 2009
Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Field of study
- Forest Ecology
September 2000 - June 2004
Publications
Publications (150)
Demographic compensation—the opposing responses of vital rates along environmental gradients—potentially delays anticipated species’ range contraction under climate change, but no consensus exists on its actual contribution. We calculated population growth rate (λ) and demographic compensation across the distributional ranges of 81 North American t...
Climate and land cover changes are rising threats to biodiversity globally. However, potentially varying biotic sensitivity is a major source of uncertainty for translating environmental changes to extinction risks. To reduce this uncertainty, we assessed how extinction risks will be affected by future human‐driven environmental changes, focusing o...
Climatic variability along elevational gradients affects biodiversity and produces a natural range of conditions for realistic experiments. Soil biodiversity is expected to respond to the general climatic conditions, as well as microclimatic effects. With the Illumina MiSeq high-throughput sequencing technique, we systematically examined the taxono...
Trophic interactions play critical roles in structuring biotic communities. Understanding variation in trophic interactions among systems provides important insights into biodiversity maintenance and conservation. However, the relative importance of bottom-up versus top-down trophic processes for broad-scale patterns in biodiversity is poorly under...
Soil microbes play critical roles in re-establishing plant diversity and ecosystem functioning after disturbance events. However, the influence of deterministic and stochastic processes in shaping microbial community assembly during long-term ecosystem recovery are poorly understood. We characterized soil prokaryotic and fungal communities along tw...
Liverworts are one of the oldest lineages of the extant land plants but the geographic patterns and ecological determinants of their species richness have not yet been studied at a global scale until now. Here, using a comprehensive global database, we find that regional species richness of liverworts in general 1) shows a clear latitudinal diversi...
Litter decomposition in mountainous forest ecosystems is an essential process that affects carbon and nutrient cycling. However, the contribution of litter decomposition to terrestrial ecosystems is difficult to estimate accurately because of the limited comparability of different studies and limited data on local microclimatic and non‐climatic fac...
Premise
Theories of plant–herbivore interactions hold that seedlings are more vulnerable to herbivory in warmer and more stable climates at lower elevations. Hypotheses of plant apparency, resource concentration, and resource availability have been proposed to explain variability in leaf herbivory. However, seasonal differences in the effects of th...
Aim
Globally, biodiversity is unevenly distributed, as a result of varying environmental conditions and regionally different historical processes. The influence of the latter on current diversity patterns is poorly understood. We explore geographic patterns of matches and mismatches between phylogenetic relatedness metrics measuring different depth...
Species range size is a central topic in macroecology, biogeography and conservation biology. Species age has been frequently regarded as a contributor to range size in previous studies on range size, but this has rarely been specifically examined. Using global data from four living terrestrial vertebrate classes (birds, mammals, reptiles and amphi...
The tendency of species to retain ancestral ecological distributions (phylo-genetic niche conservatism) is thought to influence which species from a species pool can persist in a particular environment. Thus, investigating the relationships between measures of phylogenetic structure and environmental variables at a global scale can help understand...
Investigating functional facets of biodiversity across elevation gradients provides the perspective to deepen understanding of the response of communities to global changes. Functional ecology approaches typically assume that filtering of traits across broad environmental gradients is largely due to species turnover rather than intraspecific trait...
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) based on Laser Scanning (LS) has been quickly developed in the last decades. However, the application of LS-SLAM in forest environments is still at an early development stage, limited by the challenges posed by forest environments, such as geometric degeneration and Global Navigation Satellite System (GN...
Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) technology has been demonstrated to be able to measure forest structure fast, non-destructively, and with high precision. The registration of point cloud data from different scans is a prerequisite for an in-depth understanding of forest structure. Currently, automated registration methods for forest point clouds ty...
Endemism of lineages lies at the core of understanding variation in community composition among geographic regions because it reflects how speciation, extinction, and dispersal have influenced current distributions. Here, we investigated geographic patterns and ecological drivers of taxonomic and phylogenetic endemism of angiosperm genera across th...
Although originating from a common Gondwanan flora, the diversity and composition of the floras of Africa and South America have greatly diverged since continental breakup of Africa from South America now having much higher plant species richness. However, the phylogenetic diversity of the floras and what this tells us about their evolution remaine...
Plant-herbivore interactions hold that seedlings are more vulnerable to insect predation in warmer and more stable climates at lower elevations. Several hypotheses of plant apparency, resource concentration, and resource availability have been proposed to explain the variability in leaf herbivory, but seasonal variations of leaf herbivory on seedli...
The global cooling beginning in the Eocene has caused the coverage of tropical forests to contract from covering nearly all of Africa during the early Tertiary to about one tenth of Africa at the present time. Accompanying the climate cooling and drying was the evolution of traits tolerating cold and drought, particularly extreme drought in the Sah...
Biodiversity is and always has been an important issue in ecological research. Biodiversity can reflect niche partitioning among species at several spatial and temporal scales and is generally highest in the tropics. One theory to explain it is that low-latitude tropical ecosystems are dominated by species that are generally only distributed over a...
Tree species diversity is vital for maintaining ecosystem functions, yet our ability to map the distribution of tree diversity is limited due to difficulties in traditional field-based approaches. Recent developments in spaceborne remote sensing provide unprecedented opportunities to map and monitor tree diversity more efficiently. Here we built pa...
The dispersal of invasive alien plant species (IAPS) into mountains has posed great threats to local native plant species. It has been assumed that high intraspecific trait variability contributes to the spread of invasive plant species, even along mountains. Although intraspecific variability of single trait was more often investigated, Grime's co...
Accurate and efficient detection of canopy gaps is essential for understanding species regeneration and community dynamics in forests. Unoccupied aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with visible light (e.g., RGB) cameras have the potential to be one of the most cost‐effective approaches for detecting gaps. However, current gap‐detection methods based o...
Temperature lapse rate (TLR), measured as the degree of temperature change along an altitudinal gradient, is a key indicator of multiple ecological processes of mountain systems. Although many studies have examined temperature changes of open air or near-surface along altitudes, we know little about altitudinal variations of soil temperature, which...
The complex topography of subtropical montane forests favors the coexistence of diverse plant species, making these species-rich forests a high priority for biodiversity monitoring, prediction, and conservation. Mapping tree species distribution accurately in these areas is an essential basis for biodiversity research and is often challenging due t...
Knowledge of relationships between phylogenetic structure of a biological assemblage and ecological factors that drive the variation of phylogenetic structure among regions is crucial for understanding the causes of variation in taxonomic composition and richness among regions, but this knowledge is lacking for the global flora of ferns. Here, we f...
Tropical montane ecosystems are the centers of biodiversity, and Janzen proposed that mountain climate variability plays a key role in sustaining this biodiversity. We test this hypothesis for soil bacteria and fungi along a 265–1,400 m elevational gradient on Hainan Island of tropical China, representing diverse vegetation types from deciduous mon...
Urbanization is altering the co-occurrence networks of ecological communities that are critical to maintaining ecosystem functions and services. Soil microbial communities play key roles in various ecosystem processes, but how soil microbial co-occurrence networks respond to urbanization is unclear. Here we analyzed co-occurrence networks in soil a...
Allometric growth equations help to describe the correlation between the variables of tree biological characteristics (e.g., diameter and height, diameter and canopy width) and estimate tree dynamics at a given tree dimension. Allometric models of common tree species within urban forests are also important to relate ecosystem services to common urb...
Species diversity of angiosperms (flowering plants) varies greatly among regions. Geographic patterns of variation in species diversity are shaped by the interplay of ecological and evolutionary processes. Here, using a comprehensive data set for regional angiosperm floras across the world, we show geographic patterns of taxonomic (species) diversi...
Freeman et al. (Reports, 22 July 2022, p. 416) argue that interspecific competition rather than climate is the leading driver of bird species' elevational ranges. A reanalysis of their data shows no support for the competition hypothesis, but a strong effect of climate seasonality on species ranges. Their results are artifacts arising from a subopt...
The tree of life (TOL) is severely threatened by climate and land-cover changes. Preserving the TOL is urgent, but has not been included in the post-2020 global biodiversity framework. Protected areas (PAs) are fundamental for biological conservation. However, we know little about the effectiveness of existing PAs in preserving the TOL of plants an...
Aim & Method: During the 30th anniversaries of the commencement of UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the establishment of the journal Biodiversity Science, we conducted questionnaire surveys from Chinese biodiversity researchers to collect the important questions in biodiversity science, and finally collected 763 questions from 281 particip...
The recalcitrant understory fern layer is an important ecological filter for seedling regeneration, yet how the fern layer influences seedling regeneration dynamics remains unclear. Here we transplanted 576 seedlings of four dominant tree species, Castanopsis fargesii, Lithocarpus glaber, Schima superba and Hovenia acerba, to the treatments of Dipl...
Assessing the vulnerability of biodiversity under global climate change is one of the major tasks in ecology and conservation biology. Although species' vulnerability to climate change depends on habitat exposure, species sensitivity and adaptability, multifaceted studies on the impacts of climate change on biodiversity are still lacking. The aim o...
Aim
What factors may affect species range sizes remains a central question in ecology and biogeography. Particularly, whether and how species richness may regulate average species range size remains largely elusive. Here, we explore the relationship between species diversity and species range size at a global extent and discuss its implications and...
The scientific names of organisms are key identifiers of plants and animals. Correctly treating scientific names is a prerequisite for biodiversity research and documentation. Here, we present an R package, ‘U.Taxonstand’, which can standardize and harmonize scientific names in plant and animal species lists at a fast speed and at a high rate of ma...
The role of regional species diversity in large-scale species invasions has been largely controversial. On the one hand, it has been proposed that diversity may facilitate invasion (“diversity begets diversity”) because regions with higher diversity may indicate favorable conditions for many more species. On the other hand, high diversity may indic...
Rapid technological advancements and increasing data availability have improved the capacity to monitor and evaluate Earth's ecology via remote sensing. However, remote sensing is notoriously ‘blind’ to fine‐scale ecological processes such as interactions among plants, which encompass a central topic in ecology.
Here, we discuss how remote sensing...
Aims: Despite that vascular plants constitute an important component of overall global biodiversity and have been studied well over two centuries, the questions of "How many species of vascular plants are there in the world and how many of them have been discovered and described?" remain open. Here, we address the second of the two questions. Metho...
Aims: Despite that vascular plants constitute an important component of overall global biodiversity and have been studied well over two centuries, the questions of "How many species of vascular plants are there in the world and how many of them have been discovered and described?" remain open. Here, we address the second of the two questions. Metho...
As one of the global biodiversity hotspots, the mountains of Central Asia are home to a large number of wild fruit species. Although the hotspots are constantly being seriously affected by climate and land-use changes, effective assessments of the impacts of these changes for the dominant species of wild fruit forests, wild apple (Malus sieversii),...
Extremely old trees have important roles in providing insights about historical climatic events and supporting cultural values, yet there has been limited work on their global distribution and conservation. We extracted information on 197,855 tree cores from 4854 sites and combined it with other tree age (e.g., the OLDLIST) data from a further 156...
Despite that several studies have shown that data derived from species lists generated from distribution occurrence records in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) are not appropriate for those ecological and biogeographic studies that require high sampling completeness, because species lists derived from GBIF are generally very inco...
Research in global change ecology relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature in open areas at around 2 m above the ground. These climatic grids do not reflect conditions below vegetation canopies and near the ground surface, where critical ecosystem functions occur and most terrestrial species reside. Here, we...
The impact of climate change on biodiversity operates through a complex mixture of habitat loss and range shift through the emergence of newly suitable areas (Warren et al., 2013). The main question is therefore to determine whether species have the ability to balance the loss of suitable habitats by effectively shifting their ranges and track suit...
The most salient feature of forests is the vertical-filling architecture of its constituent species. However, among the possible determinants of tree community assembly, vertical niche differentiation has been poorly studied. Here we used an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle to measure spatial variation of canopy structure in five subtropical forest plots in...
Mountain systems harbor an evolutionarily unique and exceptionally rich biodiversity, especially for amphibians. However, the associated elevational gradients and underlying mechanisms of amphibian diversity in most mountain systems remain poorly understood. Here, we explored amphibian phylogenetic and functional diversity along a 2 600 m elevation...
Urbanization alters the physicochemical environment on an unprecedented scale and strongly affects biodiversity. How urbanization affects the biodiversity of soil microbial communities, especially in large cities, however, is poorly known. We investigated soil microbial communities from 258 sites covering a variety of environmental gradients in the...
Climate and land‐cover changes are major threats to biodiversity, and their impacts are expected to intensify in the future. Protected areas (PAs) are crucial for biodiversity conservation. However, their effectiveness under future climate and land‐cover changes remains to be evaluated. Moreover, the impacts of climate and land‐cover changes on mul...
Abstract: The evergreen broad-leaved forest is a zonal vegetation type in the subtropical regions
of China. However, due to complex vertical structure and relatively dense canopy of subtropical
forests, we are lack of reliable data in current canopy studies of this forest. Here we present a large
dataset of visible light remote sensing images of fo...
University campuses (including college campuses) are home to many ecologists and conservationists, resulting in a large number of studies on campus plant and animal taxa. However, a systematic review on the biodiversity of university campuses is still lacking. We conducted a comprehensive review covering the history, diversity and distribution patt...
We synthesize published botanical information for the flora of Africa to address multiple questions, including the following: How many species of vascular plants are there in Africa? How are the species distributed among different phylogenetic clades or taxonomic groups of vascular plants and different geographic regions across Africa? How complete...
Urban greenspace plays an important role in buffering the threat of urbanization to biodiversity. Biodiversity research in urban greenspace is essential for understanding the impacts of human activities on biodiversity and the associated ecosystem functioning and services in urban ecosystems. However, we lack large‐scale biodiversity datasets in ur...
近 20 年来,我国生物多样性研究快速发展,在生物多样性志书编研、生物多样性起源与演化、生物多样性维持机制及与生态系统功能和服务的关系、生物多样性威胁因素及对全球变化的响应、生物多样性与生
态安全,以及生物多样性研究平台建设等方面都取得了长足进步,但生物多样性科学方面的理论性突破仍较少。为促进生物多样性研究的进一步发展,我们建议: (1)加强生物多样性科学与生物多样性保护实践及可持续利用的结合;(2)加强新技术与新方法在生物多样性研究中的应用;(3)加强与扩大国际合作。
The human introduction and spread of species in urban greenspace may lead to an increase in the similarity of plant species composition between distant areas. Univervsity campuses are an important element of greenspace in many cities, but we know little about the extent to which such biotic homogenization of plant species can be detected across dif...
Aims
Biodiversity patterns along elevational gradients have been well documented. Yet, the variations of biodiversity patterns along elevations and their underlying mechanisms are still unclear. Integrating multiple facets of biodiversity provides novel insights into the mechanisms for driving community assembly. In this study, species abundance in...
Research in environmental science relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature at around 2 meter above ground1-3. These climatic grids however fail to reflect conditions near and below the soil surface, where critical ecosystem functions such as soil carbon storage are controlled and most biodiversity resides4-8...
Biodiversity science in China has seen rapid growth over recent decades, ranging from baseline biodiversity studies to understanding the processes behind evolution across dynamic regions such as the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. We review research, including species catalogues, biodiversity monitoring, the origins, distributions, maintenance, and threat...
Biodiversity science in China has seen rapid growth over recent decades, ranging from baseline biodiversity studies to understanding the processes behind evolution across dynamic regions such as the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. We review research, including species catalogues; biodiversity monitoring; the origins, distributions, maintenance and threats...
Ecosystem restoration is regarded as one of the most cost-effective ways of mitigating the effects of the ongoing climate- and anthropogenic changes and slow or revert the loss of biodiversity. Forest restoration has much potential to conserve forest specialist species and ecosystem services, by using multiple, native tree species to promote a high...
Current analyses and predictions of spatially‐explicit patterns and processes in ecology most often rely on climate data interpolated from standardized weather stations. This interpolated climate data represents long‐term average thermal conditions at coarse spatial resolutions only. Hence, many climate‐forcing factors that operate at fine spatiote...
Trees are of vital importance for ecosystem functioning and services at local to global scales, yet we still lack a detailed overview of the global patterns of tree diversity and the underlying drivers, particularly the imprint of paleoclimate. Here, we present the high-resolution (110 km) worldwide mapping of tree species richness, functional and...
Aims
Taller forest canopies may harbour higher biodiversity by providing more and varied resources. No previous studies have assessed whether forest canopy height shapes the taxonomic and functional diversity of terrestrial vertebrates at global and regional scales. Here, we examine the roles of forest canopy height and other environmental variable...
Plant diversity has long been assumed to predict soil microbial diversity. However, contradictory results have been found when examining their relationships, particularly at broad spatial scales. To address this issue, we conducted a meta‐analysis to evaluate the patterns in the correlation between plant diversity and soil microbial diversity and t...