About
54
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439
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Additional affiliations
August 2018 - present
Position
- Professor (Associate)
Description
- Theoretical Ecology about food webs, ecological networks, spatial synchrony, and Taylor's Law
January 2016 - May 2018
July 2013 - September 2014
Publications
Publications (54)
Species extinctions are accelerating globally, yet the mechanisms that maintain local biodiversity remain poorly understood. The extinction of species that feed on or are fed on by many others (i.e. ‘hubs’) has traditionally been thought to cause the greatest threat of further biodiversity loss. Very little attention has been paid to the strength o...
Taylor's law (TL) is a widely observed empirical pattern that relates the variances to the means of groups of nonnegative measurements via an approximate power law: variance
g
≈ a [Formula: see text] mean
g
b
, where g indexes the group of measurements. When each group of measurements is distributed in space, the exponent b of this power law is...
Natural ecosystems typically consist of many small and few large organisms. The scaling of this negative relationship between body mass and abundance has important implications for resource partitioning and energy usage. Global warming over the next century is predicted to favour smaller organisms, producing steeper mass–abundance scaling and a les...
1.Taylor's law (TL), a commonly observed and applied pattern in ecology, describes variances of population densities as related to mean densities via log(variance)=log(a)+b*log(mean). Variations among datasets in the slope, b, have been associated with multiple factors of central importance in ecology, including strength of competitive interactions...
Understanding the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem stability is a central goal of ecologists. Recent studies have concluded that biodiversity increases community temporal stability by increasing the asynchrony between the dynamics of different species. Theoretically, this enhancement can occur through either increased between-species...
Understanding the mechanisms of diversity–productivity relationships is a central question in community ecology. Grazing is the main driving force affecting biodiversity, function, and stability of grassland ecosystems, and thus should play an important role in mediating diversity-productivity relationships. In this study, we examined the effect of...
The stability of soil microbial community plays a key role in nutrient cycling, soil organic carbon reservoirs, and plant productivity, making them crucial players in agroecosystems. Although the effect of agricultural intensification on microbial communities has been extensively studied, little is known about the stability of the microbial network...
This research is one of the very few studies that seeks to examine the association between China’s industrial development and its energy sustainability. It does so by discussing the impact of industrialization on energy security in the new era, during which the focuses of industrialization and energy security in China have changed. The former has s...
Synchronous dynamics (fluctuations that occur in unison) are universal phenomena with widespread implications for ecological stability. Synchronous dynamics can amplify the destabilizing effect of environmental variability on ecosystem functions such as productivity, whereas the inverse, compensatory dynamics, can stabilize function. Here we combin...
Understanding the processes that stabilize species populations is a fundamental question in ecology and central to conservation biology. In metapopulations, dispersal can act as a ‘double edged' sword for species stability by simultaneously decreasing local population variability (thereby decreasing local extinction risk) while increasing spatial s...
The stability of food web is a hot issue and a research frontier in ecology which has attracted widespread interests. In this research, a new investigation is conducted on the stability of food web. We take Somme Bay as a study case and employ a dynamic model to analyze food web characteristics, with the model parameters determined by energy flow b...
Ensuring industrialization and energy security in a positive direction at the same time is significant to achieve high-quality development of the regional economy. This study attempts to provide two evaluation index systems for industrialization and energy security in the new era and discuss the impact of industrialization on energy security in the...
The kinetic evaluation of the biogas potential from heavy metal stressed anaerobic fermentation process was performed using modified sigmoidal bacterial growth curve equations (modified Gompertz and Logistic) in order to investigate their suitability to describe the degradation patterns associated with varied heavy metal species and concentration....
Fluctuations in population abundances are often correlated through time across multiple locations, a phenomenon known as spatial synchrony. Spatial synchrony can exhibit complex spatial structures, termed ‘geographies of synchrony’, that can reveal mechanisms underlying population fluctuations. However, most studies have focused on spatial extents...
Understanding the mechanisms governing ecological stability—why a property such as primary productivity is stable in some communities and variable in others—has long been a focus of ecology. Compensatory dynamics, in which anti‐synchronous fluctuations between populations buffer against fluctuations at the community level, are a key theoretical mec...
Species extinctions can lead to the collapse of our ecosystems. So, biodiversity conservation is significant in protecting our environment. Identifying the roles of species on ecological network robustness is an effective way to conserve biodiversity. Previous studies have mostly focused on the role of an individual species in the whole food web. T...
Understanding the mechanisms governing ecological stability - why a property such as primary productivity is stable in some communities and variable in others - has long been a focus of ecology. Compensatory dynamics, in which anti-synchronous fluctuations between populations buffer against fluctuations at the community level, is a key theoretical...
Background and aims:
Differences in local abundance and ploidy level are predicted to impact the direction of introgression between species. Here, we tested these hypotheses on populations of Betula albosinensis (red birch) and Betula platyphylla (white birch) which were thought to differ in ploidy level, the former being tetraploid and the latter...
The mean and variance of ecological measures usually follow a power-law relationship, referred to as Taylor's power law (TPL). Leaves are important organs for photosynthesis, and leaf size is closely related to photosynthetic potential. Leaf size has different physical measures, such as leaf length, area, and fresh or dry weight. However, it has no...
The first quantitative picture of the geographical distribution pattern of plant life-form spectra in China using SPSS and ArcGIS is presented. Based on the plant species data in 147 nature reserves across China and Raunkiaerian life-form classification system, we classified those reserves into five clusters using the cluster analysis. We quantifie...
It has been confirmed in many food webs that the interactions between species are divided into “compartments,” that is, subgroups of highly interacting taxa with few weak interactions between the subgroups. Many of the current methods for detecting compartments in food webs are borrowed from network theory, which do little to improve our understand...
Taylor’s power law (TPL) can be applied to the mean-variance relationship for various quantities, e.g.,
population densities over space and time, biomass of plants in the growth processes, developmental rates
and growth rates of arthropods at different temperatures, etc. When TPL holds in the grouped data (e.g.,
the biomass of plants at different i...
Identifying the potentially suitable climatic geographical range for Liriodendron chinense (L. chinense) and predicting its responses to climate change is urgently necessary, as L. chinense is an important tertiary relict tree species. In this study, we simulated the potentially suitable climatic habitat of L. chinense in China using maximum entrop...
Studies on phosphorus (P) distributions comparing planted and unplanted systems often lead to controversial results regarding the importance and growth seasons of plants. In the present study, the distribution and mobility of phosphorus fractionations (PFs) in eutrophic water and sediments were investigated in the absence or presence of two macroph...
The relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is a central issue in ecology, especially in aquatic ecosystems due to the ecophysiological characteristics of plankton. Recently, ecologists have obtained conflicting conclusions while analyzing the influence of species diversity on plankton resource use efficiency (RUE) and community...
Seasonal variations of zooplankton community structure and their relationships with both environmental factors and phytoplankton biomass are investigated in Lake Nansihu. A total of 76 zooplankton species were identified in the lake, including 17 protozoa, 36 rotifera, 12 cladocera and 11 copepods species, respectively. Zooplankton species richness...
The relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is a central issue in
ecology, but how this relationship is affected by nutrient stress is still unknown. In this study, we
analyzed the phytoplankton diversity effects on community biomass and stability along nutrient
gradients in an artificial eutrophic lake. Four nutrient gradients,...
Phytoplankton is the primary producer and the basis of most aquatic food webs. Characterising the variations in phytoplankton communities and the factors affecting these variations in a fluctuating environment are central issues in ecology and essential to developing appropriate conservation strategies. In the present study, seasonal variations in...
Seasonal variations of zooplankton community structure and their relationships with both environmental factors and phytoplankton biomass are investigated in Lake Nansihu. A total of 76 zooplankton species were identifed in the lake, including 17 protozoa, 36 rotifera, 12 cladocera and 11 copepods species, respectively. Zooplankton species richness...
Field investigations were carried out in June 2011 and 2012 in Lake Qixinghu, a heavy eutrophic lake. Main environmental factors, phytoplankton community composition, the densities and biomasses of different phytoplankton species were measured. The influence of environmental factors on phytoplankton was analyzed through canonical correspondence ana...
The stability of phytoplankton biomass is important in maintaining the health of an aquatic ecosystem. In this study, the main environmental factors and phytoplankton biomass were investigated monthly from May 2011 to April 2013 in a eutrophic lake. The influence of both the mean values and variability (standard deviation) of environmental factors...
The relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is a central issue in ecology. The insurance hypothesis suggests that biodiversity could improve community productivity and reduce the temporal variability of main ecosystem processes. In the present study, we used a plankton community that was investigated from 2011 to 2014 in Lake Na...
The relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is a central issue in ecology. Previous studies have shown that producer diversity can impact the consumer community via predator-prey interactions. However, direct observations of this relationship remain rare, in particular for aquatic ecosystems. In this research, the relationship b...
Population biomass, a key concept in traditional ecology, plays a vital role in assessing the consequences of biodiversity loss, in terms of community structure and ecosystem processes. Recent studies derived from network analysis assumed node degree, the number of trophic links of a focal node, as an indicator of node importance in maintaining sta...
Species richness of phytoplankton (SRP) is influenced by both nutrients competition and predation in aquatic ecosystems. In this research, in a recovering lake, the concentration of total nitrogen (TN), total phosphorus (TP), ammonia nitrogen (NH4+-N), biomass of zooplankton (BZ), density of zooplankton (DZ), species richness of zooplankton (SRZ) a...
We monitored the invertebrate community of leaf litter in and around a drying intermittent pool bed to explore patterns of ecological organisation across a complex environmental gradient, with particular focus on population and community size structure. We measured the body size of 24,609 individuals from 313 taxa ranging over 6 orders of magnitude...
Nutrient enrichment has a great influence on the stability of producer species. However, in the presence of predators, its influence has not yet been studied. In this research, we build a food web model which coupled a classic nutrient competition model with a bio-energetic predator-prey model, and a trade-off between competitive abilities of produ...
Nutrients supplies play a crucial role in population distribution of food webs, and it is one of the most important challenges in both theoretical and applied ecology to better understand the ‘bottom-up’ effect. Here we analyzed a realistic food web containing one limiting nutrient and two producer-consumer interactions. Through the simulations of...
Specialist predation is believed to play a crucial role in maintaining biodiversity of ecosystems, whereas its underlying mechanism is still unclear. Here we analyzed a general model of a tritrophic system containing specialist predators. A new graphical approach based on the balance of resource recruitment and consumption was used. The analyses sh...
Accumulation of hard-to-degrade or nondegradable chemicals may be created in a long-time granule sludge treatment process. The excess accumulation of target chemicals on aerobic granules (AG) might induce inevitable release in sequencing batch reactors. In order to investigate the combined extent on AG with oxytetracycline (OTC) and copper as well...
In considering energy flow between organism and environment, population dynamics for single species is studied in the present research. When the total available energy of environment is infinite, a model obeying the Malthusian law is obtained. Under the condition of limited total available energy, a model approximate Logistic Model is also establis...
In this study, a new dynamical model is established based on Thornes’ model. Then a detailed competitive and interactive relationship between soil erosion process and vegetation growth process is detected in humid regions. By employing the nonlinear dynamical analyses, a globally asymptotically stable equilibrium point is obtained under given param...
In order to study the stability of chaotic behaviors, a nonlinear dynamical model of the competing multispecies with a predator is investigated. A series of numerical simulations is demonstrated via wave diagram and phase diagram. The results show that the chaos can change into either oscillation or ordinary equilibrium as the attacking rate of the...
Questions
Questions (3)
I have a character "2:5" in R. I want to get the numbers 2, 3, 4, 5. What should I do? Thanks.
Hi,
I have a big dataset with mat format (used for Matlab). It is a giant matrix. Its size is about 280 MB. I am trying to input it into R using the function 'readMat' in package 'R.matlab'. However, it took soooo long time (about 20 minutes) and then it threw out an error 'cannot allocate vector of size 10.7Gb'. Though it can be easily inputed in Matlab (about 1 minute).
Does anyone know how to input a large mat dataset into R quickly? And why the memory stuff is OK in Matlab but not in R?
Thanks,
Lei
I want to divide my ocean data into 5 groups: North Pacific, South Pacific, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, and Indian. Does anyone know the dataset or R package doing this?
Many thanks!
Lei
