Uploaded April 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Abstract: A central quest in ecological research is to understand the ecological dynamics maintaining biodiversity. However, when making strong and robust assessments of ecological dynamics, a fundamental challenge is that we very rarely possess complete information about the entire ecological system. To address this challenge, my talk will focus on three major questions. First, given that an ecological community only assembles once, how can we understand if the order of species arrivals influence community stability? Second, given that we can only measure a subset of species, how can we quantify the stability of the whole ecological community from measures of the subset? Third, given that an ecological system harbors many interactions, how can we detect which interactions are evolving on ecological timescales? In sum, my talk shows how carefully designed theory allows rigorous extrapolation and prediction from limited data.
Profile: Chuliang Song is a quantitative ecologist and is currently an assistant professor at Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCLA. His work aims to develop rigorous theory through interdisciplinary tools, devise monitoring-applicable metrics, and validate these approaches with empirical data from a broad range of ecosystems. Personal Website: clsong.com
Find out more about the TSVP on the program website: oist.jp/visiting-program
#OIST #OIST_TSVP #Theoretical #Science #VisitingProgram #Okinawa #TSVP #Ecology #biodiversity
Abstract: A central quest in ecological research is to understand the ecological dynamics maintaining biodiversity. However, when making strong and robust assessments of ecological dynamics, a fundamental challenge is that we very rarely possess complete information about the entire ecological system. To address this challenge, my talk will focus on three major questions. First, given that an ecological community only assembles once, how can we understand if the order of species arrivals influence community stability? Second, given that we can only measure a subset of species, how can we quantify the stability of the whole ecological community from measures of the subset? Third, given that an ecological system harbors many interactions, how can we detect which interactions are evolving on ecological timescales? In sum, my talk shows how carefully designed theory allows rigorous extrapolation and prediction from limited data.
Profile: Chuliang Song is a quantitative ecologist and is currently an assistant professor at Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCLA. His work aims to develop rigorous theory through interdisciplinary tools, devise monitoring-applicable metrics, and validate these approaches with empirical data from a broad range of ecosystems. Personal Website: clsong.com
Find out more about the TSVP on the program website: oist.jp/visiting-program
#OIST #OIST_TSVP #Theoretical #Science #VisitingProgram #Okinawa #TSVP #Ecology #biodiversity
