Published on Apr 9, 2020
We just finished a field trip to Tanzania in Feb 1 - March 25, and surveyed the lakes across Tanzania and the streams along the elevational gradient on Mt. Kilimanjaro. This trip is fruitful with valuable samples now returned. Such an international field trip is also memorable due to the unique time window during which the COVID-19 epidemic was [...] Read more
Published on Mar 10, 2020
Community variation (i.e. beta diversity) along geographical gradients is of substantial interest in ecology and biodiversity reserves in the face of global changes. However, the generality in beta diversity patterns and underlying processes remains less studied across trophic levels and geographical regions. We documented beta diversity patterns [...] Read more
Published on Oct 11, 2019
We are pleased to have one manuscript accepted by Science of the Total Environment. This manuscript, lead by Annika Vilmi and Wenqian Zhao in our group, is focusing on the stream communities in Hengduan Mountain biodiversity hotspot of the Tibetan Plateau. Before Annika is finishing her stay in China, she presents the main findings of this [...] Read more
Published on Jul 18, 2019
Understanding biodiversity patterns and the role of biotic attributes in governing these patterns remains one of the most important challenges in ecology. Here, using water depth in Lake Lugu as a typical geographical gradient, we examined the community compositions of three taxonomic groups, bacteria, diatoms and chironomids, using molecular and [...] Read more
Published on Nov 18, 2018
Taxonomic scaling, such as taxonomic coverage and taxonomic resolution, could affect the biodiversity patterns and their environmental determinants. A paper, lead by Chih-Fu Yeh, an undergraduate student when he started the project, was just online on this topic titled “Elevational patterns and hierarchical determinants of biodiversity across [...] Read more
Published on Jun 6, 2018
Iberian Peninsula is a kind of mountainous region and a very impressive place to study biodiversity and climate change. Supported by the Miguel(s)' team, I went around the peninsula twice from April to June, and easily caught the shining sun, rain, snow and hailstone. We finally managed to perform the field microcosm experiments similar to our [...] Read more
Published on Feb 3, 2018
In the past 2-3 weeks, we were busy in moving our offices and laboratories to Xianlin, Nanjing. We started to work in Xianlin this week, and are now having brand new working environments. Felix from Spain joined our group in Feb. Welcome.
Published on Jun 28, 2017
Range size, the ‘fundamental unit’ of macroecology, is generally geographically limited, and few species are ubiquitously distributed, even for microorganisms (e.g., bacteria and diatoms). The systematic variation in range size along geographical gradients (i.e., elevation or latitude) represents an important underlying driver of species richness [...] Read more