11月4日：Academic Workshop on Plant Functional Traits in Island Ecosystems

【一】

讲座题目：Aboveground-belowground linkages in the boreal forest: islands, traits and carbon storage

主 讲 人：David Wardle 研究员

主 持 人：阎恩荣 教授

报告人简介：

David Wardle is Professor of Forest Ecology at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His research explores the links between aboveground and belowground communities and their consequences for ecosystem functioning. A large proportion of this work is field based and in natural ecosystems, and includes work in Swedish boreal forest and subarctic tundra, and forests in New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere. Current projects focus on ecosystem impacts of invasive biota; consequences of wildfire; ecological changes across successional, retrogressive and elevational gradients; aspects of island ecology; and the ecological role of forest understory vegetation.

报告内容简介: 

This report shows studies we have been conducting on islands in a lake system in northern Sweden since 1995, where the main disturbance regime is fire through lightning strike. Here, large islands get struck often by lightning and burn frequently, while small islands are struck much less often and some have not burned for 5000 years. This variation in fire regime serves as an important driver of plant functional traits both within-and across species. However, and contrary to expectations, this trait variation is not a strong driver of carbon sequestration in the system; variation in carbon storage and nutrient supply across islands is instead driven by variation in the composition and functional properties of the fungal communities among the islands.

【二】

讲座题目：Linking major environmental disturbances and biogeochemistry via plant traits to island biogeography

主 讲 人：J. Hans C. Cornelissen 教授

主 持 人：阎恩荣 教授

报告人简介：

J. Hans C. Cornelissen, professor of Vrije University Amsterdam, is interested in the role of functional trait variation in plant and ecosystem functioning, with a particular focus on how vegetation composition impacts on carbon and nutrient cycling. He is willing to find out not only what determines the functional (trait) diversity of plants in ecosystems, but also how (much) this functional diversity drives important carbon cycling processes. Further, he is heavily involved in various global change impact experiments and meta-analyses. And more than 200 papers were published in such journals as Nature, Ecology Letters, Global Change Biology, Journal of Ecology, Journal of Applied Ecology, Functional Ecology, etc.

报告内容简介: This report focus with the role of trees and especially the fates and rates of their coarse woody debris. First I will argue that, compared to mainland forest areas, forests on islands especially smaller ones are more likely to be dominated by only one or a few tree species, especially if these are strongly clonal. The traits of the dead wood of these species will strongly drive biogeochemical process trajectories and rates. Second, because of stochasticity of colonization and major environmental disturbances, which specific tree species dominate and how they control biogeochemistry via their wood traits, should show great variance among islands. To test these hypotheses, I will discuss how common garden experiments, especially tree cemeteries such as the recently established Funlog experiment in SE China, may help to advance this research line linking island biogeography, wood traits and biogeochemical cycling.

【三】

讲座题目：Habitat size as a key driver of ecological shifts

主 讲 人：陈小勇 教授

主 持 人：张 健 教授

报告人简介：

Xiaoyong Chen is the dean of School of Ecological and Environmental Sciences, East China Normal University. In recent years, he has been particularly interested in the co-evolution between plants and animals (especially insects) and their response to habitat changes, mainly involving the mechanism of biodiversity maintenance in fragmented habitats, the relationship between animals and plants, and the application of molecular genetic markers to the study on plant ecology in both terrestrial and wetland ecosystems. He hosted over ten National Science Foundation projects. More than 70 SCI papers have been published especially in some top journals such as Science and Ecology letters. Furthermore, he has served on several editorial boards, such as Biodiversity, Chinese Journal of Plant Ecology, and Guihaia.

报告内容简介: 

Scale plays a critical role in ecological issues, and almost all ecological patterns and processes may change at different scales. Habitat size directly determines how large a population is and thus probability of local extinction of specific species, consequently species composition and abundance change across habitats of different sizes. In the presentation, we will show two ecological shifts regulated by habitat size. The first one is about the presence and absence of Janzen-Cornell effect with decreasing habitat size, and the second is top-down and bottom-up shift.

【四】

讲座题目：Functional and phylogenetic structure of bird communities on land-bridge islands

主 讲 人：斯幸峰 博士

主 持 人：张 健 教授

报告人简介：

Xingfeng Si is the research professor of School of Ecological and Environmental Sciences, East China Normal University. He received his PhD. degree in ecology from Zhejiang University in 2014, and then worked as a postdoctor there and at the University of Toronto. He is principally a community ecologist and biogeographer, with a special interest in birds and mammals. His current research examines biodiversity changes and community assembly of island faunas using functional and phylogenetic approaches at the Thousand Island Lake in China, and the influence of anthropogenic activities on insular distributions of animals at a global scale. He is the author of numerous scientific publications and is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Animal Ecology.

报告内容简介: Land-bridge islands created by dam constructions can be viewed as ideal natural laboratories to understand the impacts of fragmentation on ecological systems. This report will introduce the long-term research at the Thousand Island Lake, which is a large reservoir in eastern China. The flooding of the reservoir created a set of islands of different sizes that represents a large-scale, unplanned experimental system. He has used this system to produce a series of work that asks a fundamental question: how anthropogenically transformed habitats affect biodiversity changes and community assembly? Additionally he examines the extinction process of island faunas and how these species distribute on these remnant habitats in the framework of the theory of island biogeography.

【五】

讲座题目：Islands, fire, biodiversity, and species traits in Canadian lake island systems

主 讲 人：Scott Nielsen 副教授

主 持 人：夏建阳 教授

报告人简介：

Scott Nielsen is an Associate Professor of Conservation Biology in the Department of Renewable Resources at the University of Alberta. His interests are in terrestrial ecology (plant & animal) and its applications to the field of conservation biogeography, using methods that blend field studies of species with remote sensing, GIS, and statistical modeling/forecasting. The geographic focus of his work is the boreal and hemi-boreal forests of western and central Canada and the Canadian Rocky Mountain montane forests.

报告内容简介: We have been examining island biogeography, disturbance-diversity, and fragmentation-habitat loss relationships for 3 lake-island systems in central Canada. Our lake-island fragmentation experiment used nested sets of islands to control for area allowing a direct test of fragmentation-habitat loss relationships where butterfly and plant richness were neutral to positively related to fragmentation. Second, we examined species area and trait relationships for ground beetles in a different system finding that species composition was more dissimilar on small islands, partly due to macropterous (winged) species being negatively related to island size,but positively related to isolation. And finally, we examined disturbance-diversity relationships for islands in a third area with fire return intervals varying from 62 years on the largest (>1,000 ha) islands typified as being lichen-woodlands to 1,600 years on the smallest (<0.1 ha) islands that were spruce-bryophyte dominated. Plant richness on these islands was inversely related to island isolation and positively related to canopy cover, while canopy was positively related to fire return interval and inversely related to island size. These studies demonstrate the value of using islands to study questions relating to species diversity, traits, and disturbance regimes.

【六】

讲座题目：Trophic interactions among vertebrate guilds and plants shape global patterns in species diversity

主 讲 人：张 建 教授

主 持 人：夏建阳 教授

报告人简介：

Jian Zhang is the professor (1000Plan Professorship for Young Talents) of School of Ecological and Environmental Sciences, East China Normal University. His research interests mainly include biodiversity, macroecology, community ecology, biogeography and bioinformatics. At present, the project he hosted is mainly about forest canopy detection based on small UAV and its contribution to understanding the species coexistence mechanism. He has published more than 40 papers, including over 20 SCI papers in journals such as Natural, Journal of Ecology and Journal of Biogeography. He is the editorial board of Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation.

报告内容简介: 

Trophic interactions play critical roles in structuring biotic communities. Understanding variation in trophic interactions among systems provides important insights into biodiversity maintenance and conservation. However, the relative importance of bottom-up versus top-down trophic processes for broad-scale patterns in biodiversity is poorly understood. Here, we used global datasets on species richness of vascular plants, mammals and breeding birds to evaluate the role of trophic interactions in shaping large-scale diversity patterns. Our findings demonstrate that, after accounting for environmental drivers, large-scale species richness patterns in plant and vertebrate taxa consistently support trophic interactions playing a major role in shaping global patterns in biodiversity. These findings underscore the importance of integrating trophic forcing mechanisms into studies of biodiversity patterns.

【七】

讲座题目：Islands, consumers, diversity and ecosystem processes

主 讲 人：David Wardle 研究员

主 持 人：夏建阳 教授

报告人简介: 

David Wardle is Professor of Forest Ecology at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His research explores the links between aboveground and belowground communities and their consequences for ecosystem functioning. He has authored two books on aboveground-belowground linkages, and around 300 peer-reviewed journal articles of which over 25 have appeared in Science and Nature. Wardle has been the recipient of several scientific awards (most recently the 2018 Eminent Ecologist award from the Journal of Ecology) and is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and a Wallenberg Scholar.

报告内容简介: 

This report describes studies on each of two island systems on producer and consumer communities and their ecosystem impacts. The first is the Swedish lake island system, where, by building on the talk of “Aboveground-belowground linkages in the boreal forest: islands, traits and carbon storage”, he describes how variation in plant communities and resource quality among islands impacts on both consumer communities and above- and below ground ecosystem functioning. The second involves oceanic islands off the northern coast of New Zealand for which seabirds are major ecosystem drivers by transporting nutrients from the ocean and through soil disturbance. Some islands have been invaded by rats while others have not, and when present these rats eliminate seabirds and mitigate their effects. He will show how this invasion has cascading effects on community and ecosystem properties both above-and below ground.

【八】

讲座题目：Long-term changes in taxonomic and functional composition in an island ecosystem

主 讲 人：Shekhar R. Biswas 教授

主 持 人：夏建阳 教授

报告人简介：

Shekhar Biswas is the research professor of School of Ecological and Environmental Sciences, East China Normal University. Biswas Lab’s main research interest lies at the interface of community ecology, spatial ecology and disturbance ecology. They are particularly interested in understanding (i) the structure, composition and functions of ecological communities along environmental gradients; (ii) how species and functional diversity is maintained in real landscapes; (iii) how ecological stressors (e.g. global climate change, disturbance, land use change, biological invasions etc.) interact with key ecological processes to shape the patterns of biodiversity and stability across spatial scales, and (iv) how ecological stressors affect ecosystem functions and services in real landscapes. He has published more than 20 papers in journals such as Ecology, Ecology Letters, Journal of Ecology and Landscape Ecology.

报告内容简介: 

Recent studies have detected global change-associated shifts in species and functional composition across tropical and temperate forests. However, few studies have been conducted in coastal mangrove forests, which is threatened globally due to climate change, sea level rise and land use changes. Using Bangladesh Forest Department’s inventory plots data (1986~2014), I show that species evenness in Sundarbans mangrove forest has changed markedly over the last two decades, though richness remained stable. Functionally, species with low wood density tend to replace the species with high wood density. Maintaining compositional integrity is thus critical for the sustainability of coastal island forests under the changing coastal environment.

【九】

讲座题目：Functional structure of plant assemblages across a mainland-island ecotone

主 讲 人：阎恩荣 教授

主 持 人：夏建阳 教授

报告人简介：

Enrong Yan is the professor in school of ecological and environmental sciences, East China Normal University, and also the head of Ecosystem Research and Observation Station in Putuo Island, Zhejing Province. His research focuses mainly on biodiversity conservation, vegetation structure, function and dynamics, as well as ecosystem degradation and restoration of sea islands and coast hills in Eastern China. He served as the board of Chinese Journal of Ecology and a commissioner of Shanghai Ecological Society. Furthermore, he served as the periodical reviewer of several journals, including Ecology Letters, Journal of Ecology, Landscape Ecology, Oecologia, Forest Ecology and Management, etc. And more than 30 SCI papers have been published till now.

报告内容简介: 

Mainland-island ecotone is often characterized by dramatic changes in climatic and geographic drivers of biodiversity. Still, it remains unclear how climate transition between mainland-ocean interface and island isolation affect the functional structure of plant assemblages across one of such special ecotones on earth. Here, I introduce our findings that variations in dry season rainfall and annual mean wind velocity serve the key climatic filters for controlling the transition patterns of trait dispersions and functional composition across plant communities along a 200km mainland-to-island transition zone, in eastern China. Being specific to island systems, island isolation is the main drivers of trait dispersion and functional structure of plant communities.