About this blog

This blog mainly shares my experiences in ecology and biodiversity. I will share my news and notes in Blog Posts. They are some prespectives in ecology and evolution or some protocols about R programming and ecological modeling. Few of the notes are about Python because I am trying to figure out it. Talks records the conferences and seminars I have attended, while Teaching is slides and assignments for the BSc Ecology2 course.

The Publications section contains all my published papers, which are available in Chinese or English. These papers demonstrate the changes in my research trajectory. During my BSc project, I was interested in remote sensing, niche modeling, and ecological restoration/landscape planning based on these technologies. I was really addicted to using ArcGIS and ESRI to do some geographic analysis. Then I started learning R during my MSc project. My supervisor wants me to do macroecology and conservation research, which means I need to think from a really large-scale perspective. I tried to answer some questions, such as how to use functional traits to predict species extinction, and whether global fern species conform to the tropical origin hypothesis. But I ultimately turned to small-scale/community ecology during my PhD project because large-scale research is too abstract and obscure…

Now I am a third year PhD student in Ecology and Biodiversity Group in Utrecht University. I have been paying attention to the response of grassland communities to climate stress and how diversity buffers this stress for the past three years. This field is already quite crowded, with many similar experiments being conducted worldwide, and new papers being published every day. But I still really enjoy my PhD program. I think it’s cool to apply ecological theories and models from textbooks and formulas to a one square meter grassland container. Attempting to explain what is happening on the grassland is not simple, as it involves complex relationships between plants, soil, and microbiomes. And understanding how plants are interact with soil through their roots will be an important topic of my current research.

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Last but not the least

Links to my friends

Benja A talented programmer