王少鹏

Our recent research develops new theory to understand biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and stability over space and time.

Biodiversity and ecosystem stability across spatial scales

 Members: student 1; student 2

Biodiversity is not only declining in many local ecosystems, but is also becoming increasingly homogenized across space. While the destabilizing effect of local biodiversity loss has been demonstrated in many studies, the consequence of biotic homogenization remains largely unknown. Our recent work developed a novel framework to study ecosystem stability across scales, namely alpha, beta, and gamma stability (Wang & Loreau 2014 Ecol Lett) and the stability-area relationship (Wang et al. 2017 Nat Commun). In the light of

this framework, we used metacommunity models and showed that biotic homogenization impairs ecosystem stability at large scales (Figure 1; Wang & Loreau 2016 Ecol Lett; Wang et al. 2019 Ecography). Our ongoing work collects spatiotemporal data to test these model predictions and use new statistical tools to reveal population dynamics over space and time.

Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in food webs

 Members: student 1; student 2

One challenge in merging community and ecosystem ecology is to integrate the complexity of natural multitrophic communities into concepts of ecosystem functioning. Our recent work used food web models and demonstrated that ecosystem primary production increases with vertical diversity measured by the maximum trophic level (Vertical Diversity Hypothesis or VDH; Wang & Brose 2018 Ecol Lett). We further showed that intraguild predation (IGP), a commonly observed structure in natural food webs, could maintain a higher biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in complex food webs (Wang et al. 2019 Ecology). Ongoing projects extend our models to a spatial context and collect data to test model predictions.

Eco-evolutionary Dynamics of biodiversity

 Members: student 1; student 2

The neutral theory of biodiversity (NTB) combines ecological and evolutionary processes in a unified framework. By incorporating more realistic modes of speciation (i.e. allowing interspecific variation in speciation rate), we extended the NTB and showed that eco-evolutionary dynamics could result in a demographic advantage for species with low speciation rates. This mechanism generates two patterns. (i) Average speciation rate in the community declines through time (Wang et al. 2013 Am Nat). Such a declining rate of origination has long been documented in the fossil record. (ii) Abundant species tends to have low speciation rate and thus higher phylogenetic age (Wang et al. 2013 PNAS). Such a positive age-abundance correlation is observed in Panamanian tree species.