Modeling biodiversity patterns from tropical, temperate and boreal forests

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Macroecology is a newly emerging ecological discipline aiming to search for a parsimonious set of general patterns with respect to species coexistence and biodiversity distribution and to understand the rules that underlie those patterns observed in nature. This subject has never been so exciting as it is now. The recent progress on several fronts of macroecology has greatly stimulated the debate and has substantially advanced the area. This progress includes the development of the neutral theory of biodiversity, the renewed interest in connecting community ecology to functional traits, the search for phylogenetic (evolutionary) footprints in species assemblages, and application of statistical mechanics to modeling biodiversity patterns. Based on these advances, I propose to develop and test models to explain and predict global biodiversity patterns from tropical, temperate to boreal forests. The proposed work will contribute to (1) relaxing the neutral theory by incorporating differential birth and death rates among species so that to make the neutral theory more realistic, (2) understanding the significance of phylogenetic (evolutionary) footprints in promoting biodiversity through developing phylogenetically-based biodiversity indices and genus-species models, and (3) integrating community ecology, autoecology and physiology for understanding the importance of tradeoff in functional traits to biodiversity maintenance. Theories and models developed from this study should enhance our ability to explain and predict macrecological patterns and thus build our capacity of conserving and managing biodiversity in landscapes.