Yani Meng

• PhD Candidate at East China Normal University

Grime's competitive, stress‐tolerant, ruderal (CSR) theory predicts a shift in plant communities from ruderal to stress‐tolerant strategies during secondary succession. However, this fundamental tenet lacks empirical validation using long‐term continuous successional data. Utilizing a 60‐year longitudinal data of old‐field succession, we investigat...

In On The Origin of Species, Darwin proposed two seemingly contradictory hypotheses that predict how the phylogenetic relatedness of alien species to native species can either facilitate or impede their naturalization and invasion. These two apparently opposing hypotheses, now known as “Darwin’s naturalization conundrum”, has garnered increasing at...

A widely assumed, but largely untested, tenet in ecology is that ecosystem stability tends to increase over succession. We rigorously test this idea using 60-year continuous data of old field succession across 480 plots nested within 10 fields. We found that ecosystem temporal stability increased over succession at the larger field scale (γ stabili...

Nitrogen enrichment and land use are known to influence various ecosystems, but how these anthropogenic changes influence community and ecosystem responses to disturbance remains poorly understood. Here we investigated the effects of increased nitrogen input and mowing on the resistance and recovery of temperate semiarid grassland experiencing a th...

Purpose Nitrogen (N) deposition and increased precipitation were widely reported to promote plant productivity in terrestrial ecosystems. However, few studies have explored the effects of historical resource supplements on plant communities (legacy effects). Methods Based on a field experiment, we examined the legacy effects of N deposition and in...

Elton's biotic resistance hypothesis, which posits that diverse communities should be more resistant to biological invasions, has received considerable experimental support. However, it remains unclear whether such a negative diversity–invasibility relationship would persist under anthropogenic environmental change. By using the common ragweed (Amb...

Background Soil microbial communities cope with an imbalanced supply of resources by adjusting their element acquisition and utilization strategies. Although soil pH has long been considered an essential driver of microbial growth and community composition, little is known about how soil acidification affects microbial acquisition and utilization o...