Wenyun Zuo

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• PhD
• Research Scientist at Stanford University

In ecology and evolutionary biology, understanding the relationship between vital rates (e.g., survival, development, reproduction) and population growth is essential to elucidate how life history strategies are shaped by natural selection. However, the established demographic methods to decipher the relationship between vital rates and population...

When should you claim a pension (such as social security) in the US? Much current advice focuses on the increase in the annual pension benefit as individuals delay claiming a pension, an increase due to the actuarial fairness of the system. However, individuals face two risks: whether they live to the planned claiming age, and how long they live af...

Quantifying trade‐offs within populations is important in life‐history theory. However, most studies focusing on life‐history trade‐offs focus on two traits and assume trade‐offs to be static. Our work provides a framework for understanding covariation among multiple traits and how population density influences the traits. Using detailed individual...

Quantifying trade-offs within populations is important in life-history theory. However, most studies focusing on life-history trade-offs focus on two traits and assume trade-offs to be static. Our work provides a framework for understanding covariation among multiple traits and how population density influences the traits. Using detailed individual...

Quantifying trade-offs within populations is an important goal in life-history and evolutionary theory. However, most studies focusing on life-history variation assume trade-offs to be static. In this paper, we provide a framework for understanding life-history variation at different densities while enabling us to reveal trade-offs that are often m...

Quantifying trade-offs within populations is an important goal in life-history and evolutionary theory. However, most studies focusing on life-history variation assume trade-offs to be static. In this paper, we provide a framework for understanding life-history variation at different densities while enabling us to reveal trade-offs that are often m...

A fundamental goal of Ecology is to predict how natural populations respond to disturbances. Accordingly, the last decades have witnessed key theoretical developments in stochastic demography and transient dynamics. However, both areas, have to date been largely disconnected. Here, we introduce an expression for the second derivatives of population...

We propose a general-purpose spherical location encoder, Sphere2Vec, which, as far as we know, is the first location encoder which aims at preserving spherical distance. • We provide a theoretical proof about the spherical-distance-kept nature of Sphere2Vec. • We provide theoretical proof to show why the previous 2D location encoders and NeRF-style...

Generating learning-friendly representations for points in space is a fundamental and long-standing problem in ML. Recently, multi-scale encoding schemes (such as Space2Vec and NeRF) were proposed to directly encode any point in 2D/3D Euclidean space as a high-dimensional vector, and has been successfully applied to various geospatial prediction an...

Background: Kinship groups can have considerable importance (e.g., generational support, inheritance, and information for key life events). During demographic transitions, kinship networks are reshaped by changes in mortality and fertility rates. Objective: This paper analyzes consanguineous and female kin and explores the effect on the size and s...

Extreme climatic events may influence individual‐level variability in phenotypes, survival and reproduction, and thereby drive the pace of evolution. Climate models predict increases in the frequency of intense hurricanes, but no study has measured their impact on individual life courses within animal populations. We used 45 years of demographic da...

BACKGROUND The Lee-Carter model (LC) is widely used in research and applications for forecasting age specific mortality, and typically performs well regardless of the uncertainty and often the limited quality of mortality data. OBJECTIVE Why dose LC perform well regardless of the uncertainty and the limited data quality? METHODS We analyze the ro...

Extreme climatic events may influence individual-level variability in phenotypes, survival, and reproduction, and thereby drive the pace of evolution. Here, we quantify how experiencing major hurricanes influences individual life courses in the Cayo Santiago rhesus macaques. Our results show that major hurricanes increase heterogeneity in reproduct...

Iteroparous species may reproduce at many different ages, resulting in a reproductive dispersion that affects the damping of population perturbations, and varies among life histories. Since generation time (Tc$$ {T}_c $$) is known to capture aspects of life‐history variation, such as life‐history speed, does Tc$$ {T}_c $$ also determine reproductiv...

Evolution proceeds in large part by the establishment of mutations in the genome of organisms, but even an advantageous mutation may be lost by chance. The probability of such loss is the extinction probability of an individual with a random lifetime reproductive success (LRS). We show here that the traditional approximation of extinction probabili...

Generation time has previously been the focus of comparative life history analyses. Here we examine three metrics: generation time T , reproductive dispersion S (the distribution of ages of reproduction), and damping time τ (time to converge to stable (st)age distribution). We use data on 633 species of animals and plants, and perform phylogenetica...

Generating learning-friendly representations for points in a 2D space is a fundamental and long-standing problem in machine learning. Recently, multi-scale encoding schemes (such as Space2Vec) were proposed to directly encode any point in 2D space as a high-dimensional vector, and has been successfully applied to various (geo)spatial prediction tas...

When should you claim a pension (such as Social Security) in the US? Much current advice focuses on the increase in the annual pension benefit as individuals delay claiming a pension, an increase due to the actuarial fairness of the system. However, individuals face two risks: whether they live to the planned claiming age, and how long they live af...

Evolutionary demography has grown rapidly in recent years, as the biological topics of life history evolution and evolution in population with complex life cycles have benefitted from and contributed to a broader focus on evolutionary biodemography. This chapter provides a critical summary of the central ideas and methods. The authors emphasise the...

Demography is everywhere in our lives: from birth to death. Demography shapes our daily decisions, as well as the decisions that others make on us (e.g. bank loans, retirement age). Demography is everywhere across the Tree of Life. The universal currencies of demography—survival, development, reproduction, and recruitment—shape the performance of a...

The lifetime reproductive success (LRS) of individuals is affected by random events such as death, realized growth or realized reproduction, and the outcomes of these events can differ even when individuals have identical probabilities. Another source of randomness arises when these probabilities also change over time in variable environments. For...

The lifetime reproductive success (LRS) of individuals is affected by random events such as death, realized growth, or realized reproduction, and the outcomes of these events can differ even when individuals have identical probabilities. Another source of randomness arises when these probabilities also change over time in variable environments. For...

Transient dynamics are crucial for understanding ecological and life-history dynamics. In this study, we analyze damping time, the time taken by a population to converge to a stable (st)age structure following a perturbation, for over 600 species of animals and plants. We expected damping time to be associated with both generation time T c and demo...

Studies of lifetime reproductive success (LRS) have shown that important random events can be in ecology and evolution. Randomness should be amplified in stochastic environments, and here we show this to be the case by computing the complete distribution of LRS when vital rates are Markovian can be readily computed by building on our recent paper (...

Lifetime reproductive performance is quantified here by the LRS (lifetime reproductive success), the random number of offspring an individual produces over its lifetime. Many field studies find that distributions of LRS among individuals are non‐normal, zero‐inflated and highly skewed. These results beg the question, what is the distribution of LRS...

The epidemiological transition from young to old deaths in high-income countries reduced mortality at all ages, but a major role was played by a decline of infant and child mortality from infectious diseases1,2 that greatly increased life expectancy at birth2,3. Over time, declines in infectious disease continue but chronic and degenerative causes...

Lifetime measures of reproductive performance are quantified here by the LRS (Lifetime Reproductive Success), the number of offspring an individual produces over its lifespan. General formulas for the mean, variance and higher moments of LRS are given by van Daalen and Caswell (2017). Yet, the complete set of probabilities for LRS are often essenti...

Background Despite the sharp decline in global under-5 deaths since 1990, uneven progress has been achieved across and within countries. In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for child mortality were met only by a few countries. Valid concerns exist as to whether the region would meet new Sustainable Development Goals...

Assessment of the SDG-3 targets for NMRs and U5MRs by 2030 based on estimates from the LLT model and from the IHME for 31 countries from SSA. (a) NMRs and (b) U5MRs. In LLT, predictions for Lesotho were precluded by the poor quality of data and great uncertainty in the estimates and uncertainties, and we report unbiased error bounds for our predict...

Difference in survival rates that resulted after adjusting DHS data to match UN IGME estimates for the neonatal (dNMR), post neonatal (dPMR), and child (dCMR) period from 31 SSA countries by year. Authors’ estimates using data from the DHS Program. PMR is the probability of dying between 1 month (28 days) and 11 months of age, expressed per 1,000 l...

STROBE and RECORD checklists. RECORD, REporting of studies Conducted using Observational Routinely-collected health Data; STROBE, STrenthening the Reporting of OBservational studies in Epidemiology. (DOCX)

Supplementary methods. (PDF)

Year of analysis; ARRNMR, ARRIMR, and ARRU5MR; and percentage of VE before (VEDHS) and after (VEUNIGME) adjusting DHS data to match UN IGME estimates. A brief note with formula to estimate VE is in S1 Text. Highlighted years correspond to the DHS type and year available for this analysis. For Liberia, the latest survey year was not used for analysi...

Assessment of the SDG-3 targets for NMRs and U5MRs by 2030 and 2050 based on estimates from the LLT model and from UN IGME for 31 countries from SSA. In the LLT, we report wide error bounds for our prediction models for 2030 and 2050. We retrieved UN IGME estimates online from http://data.unicef.org/topic/child-survival/child-survival-sdgs/#. LLT,...

Significance Old-age mortality decline has driven recent lifespan increases, but there is no agreement about the age pattern of old-age deaths. For example, some argue that old-age deaths should become compressed at advanced ages, and others argue that old-age deaths should become more dispersed with age. Here we show, for five decades in 20 develo...

Old age mortality decline has driven recent increases in lifespans, but there is no agreement about trends in the age-pattern of old deaths. Some hypotheses argue that old-age deaths should have become compressed at high ages, others that old-age deaths should have become more dispersed with age, and yet others are consistent with little change in...

Background: As much as 80% of global Plasmodium vivax infections occur in South Asia and there is a shortage of direct studies on infectivity of P. vivax in Anopheles stephensi, the most common urban mosquito carrying human malaria. In this quest, the possible effects of laboratory colonization of mosquitoes on infectivity and development of P. vi...

Background Malaria remains an important cause of morbidity and mortality in India. Though many comprehensive studies have been carried out in Africa and Southeast Asia to characterize and examine determinants of Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax malaria pathogenesis, fewer have been conducted in India. MethodsA prospective study of malaria...

Previous whole genome comparisons of Plasmodium falciparum populations have not included collections from the Indian subcontinent, even though two million Indians contract malaria and about 50,000 die from the disease every year. Stratification of global parasites has revealed spatial relatedness of parasite genotypes on different continents. Here,...

The importance of collective social action in current events is manifest in the Arab Spring and Occupy movements. Electronic social media have become a pervasive channel for social interactions, and a basis of collective social response to information. The study of social media can reveal how individual actions combine to become the collective dyna...

Abstract A major criticism of the "overkill" theory for the late Pleistocene extinction in the Americas has been the seeming implausibility of a relatively small number of humans selectively killing off millions of large-bodied mammals. Critics argue that early Paleoindian hunters had to be extremely selective to have produced the highly size-biase...

Supplementary data. Calculations for salmon nutrient inputs to terrestrial and riparian ecosystems. (DOCX)

The discipline of sustainability science has emerged in response to concerns of natural and social scientists, policymakers, and lay people about whether the Earth can continue to support human population growth and economic prosperity. Yet, sustainability science has developed largely independently from and with little reference to key ecological...

There is general agreement that competition for resources results in a tradeoff between plant mass, M, and density, but the mathematical form of the resulting thinning relationship and the mechanisms that generate it are debated. Here, we evaluate two complementary models, one based on the space-filling properties of canopy geometry and the other o...

Rensch's rule, which states that the magnitude of sexual size dimorphism tends to increase with increasing body size, has evolved independently in three lineages of large herbivorous mammals: bovids (antelopes), cervids (deer), and macropodids (kangaroos). This pattern can be explained by a model that combines allometry, life-history theory, and en...

The temperature size rule (TSR) is the tendency for ectotherms to develop faster but mature at smaller body sizes at higher temperatures. It can be explained by a simple model in which the rate of growth or biomass accumulation and the rate of development have different temperature dependence. The model accounts for both TSR and the less frequently...

Hypothesis: Allometric scaling of mortality versus adult body size across species is predicted by evolutionary life-history theory to be present (and precise) only if all the species in the data set share the same value for the 'height' parameter in their body-size growth curves. Results: This basic prediction is tested and supported in a large fis...

Question: Are there general life-history rules for exploitation-caused extinction of mammal populations? Mathematical methods: A population of size N faced with the added mortality of human exploitation will deterministically go extinct if its per-capita birth rate can no longer match its per-capita mortality rate as N approaches zero. We develop e...

The human population and economy have grown exponentially and now have impacts on climate, ecosystem processes, and biodiversity far exceeding those of any other species. Like all organisms, humans are subject to natural laws and are limited by energy and other resources. In this article, we use a macro ecological approach to integrate perspectives...

Our extended ontogenetic growth model is a theoretical model based on conservation of energy and general biological mechanisms underlying ontogenetic growth. We do not believe that the comments of Makarieva et al. and Sousa et al. expose substantive problems with our model. Nevertheless, they raise interesting, still unresolved questions and point...

Background/Question/Methods All organisms face the problem of how to fuel ontogenetic growth. We present a model, empirically grounded in data from birds and mammals, that correctly predicts how growing animals allocate food energy between synthesis of new biomass and maintenance of existing biomass. Previous energy budget models have typically ha...

All organisms face the problem of how to fuel ontogenetic growth. We present a model, empirically grounded in data from birds and mammals, that correctly predicts how growing animals allocate food energy between synthesis of new biomass and maintenance of existing biomass. Previous energy budget models have typically had their bases in rates of eit...

The ontogenetic growth model (OGM) of West et al. provides a general description of how metabolic energy is allocated between production of new biomass and maintenance of existing biomass during ontogeny. Here, we reexamine the OGM, make some minor modifications and corrections, and further evaluate its ability to account for empirical variation on...

The anatomical features of leaves in 11 species of plants grown in a temperature gradient and a temperature + CO2 gradient were studied. The palisade parenchyma thickness, the spongy parenchyma thickness and the total leaf thickness were measured and analyzed to investigate the effects of elevated temperature and CO2 on the anatomical characteristi...

Leaf mass per area (LMA), nitrogen concentration (on mass and area bases, N(mass) and N(area), respectively), photosynthetic capacity (A(mass) and A(area)) and photosynthetic nitrogen use efficiency (PNUE) are key foliar traits, but few data are available from cold, high-altitude environments. Here, we systematically measured these leaf traits in 7...