Chuliang Song
PostDoc
McGill University and University of Toronto
Biography
I am a theoretical and computational community ecologist. My central research goal is to understand the role of context-dependency in generating and maintaining the diversity (or lack of diversity) that we observe in nature. My PhD research has focused on understanding species coexistencen in changing environments via structural stability of local ecological systems.
I am currently a postdoc with Andrew Gonzalez at McGill University and Marie-Josée Fortin at University of Toronto. I received a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from MIT under the supervision of Serguei Saavedra, and a BS in Mathematics from Zhejiang University under the supervision of Yang-Yu Liu.
You can reach me via email: clsong.ecology AT gmail DOT com.
Interests
- Species coexistence
- Structural stability
- Priority effects
- Spatial ecology
- Nonlinear time series
Education
PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2016 - 2020
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
BSc in Mathematics, 2013 - 2016
Zhejiang University
Projects
An environment-dependent framework of ecological networks
How the architecture of species interactions affects species coexistence in fluctuating environemnts
Conceptual unification of theoretical approaches
Under what conditions different theoretical approaches tell a similar story, and what can be learned when they do not coincide.
Discontinuity and predictability of ecological assembly
Exploring the full landscape of priority effects with graph theory and algebraic topology
Publications
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(2021).
Generalism drives abundance: a computational causal discovery approach.
submitted.
(2021).
Untangling the complexity of priority effects in multi-species communities.
Submitted.
(2021).
Synthesizing the effects of individual-level variation on coexistence.
Ecological Monographs.
(2021).
Understanding the emergence of contingent and deterministic exclusion in multispecies communities.
Ecology Letters.
(2021).
Bridging parametric and nonparametric measures of species interactions unveils new insights of non-equilibrium dynamics.
Oikos.
(2021).
Coexistence holes characterize the assembly and disassembly of multispecies systems.
Nature Ecology and Evolution (* equal contibution).
(2021).
Merging dynamical and structural indicators to measure resilience in multispecies systems.
Journal of Animal Ecology (* equal contibution).
(2020).
Structural stability: concepts, methods and applications.
Biodiversity Science (in Chinese).
(2020).
Telling ecological networks apart by their structure: An environment-dependent approach.
PLOS Computational Biology.
(2020).
Towards a Probabilistic Understanding About the Context-Dependency of Species Interactions.
Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
(2020).
Disentangling the effects of external perturbations on coexistence and priority effects.
Journal of Ecology.
(2019).
Accelerating the emergence of order in swarming systems.
Advances in Complex Systems.
(2019).
On the Consequences of the Interdependence of Stabilizing and Equalizing Mechanisms.
The American Naturalist (* equal contibution).
(2019).
Beware z-scores.
Journal of Animal Ecology.
(2018).
A guideline to study the feasibility domain of multi-trophic and changing ecological communities.
Journal of Theoretical Biology.
(2018).
Rethinking the importance of the structure of ecological networks under an environment-dependent framework.
Ecology & Evolution (* equal contribution).
(2018).
Structural stability as a consistent predictor of phenological events.
Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
(2018).
Structural changes within trophic levels are constrained by within-family assembly rules at lower trophic levels.
Ecology Letters.
(2018).
Will a small randomly-assembled community be feasible and stable?.
Ecology.
(2017).
Why are some plant-pollinator networks more nested than others?.
Journal of Animal Ecology.
(2016).
Existence of positive solutions for an approximation of stationary mean-field games.
Involve, a Journal of Mathematics.
Posts
Summary of my PhD thesis
The Long March for PhD finally came to the end. I am proud of what came out of it. Though all my research projects had quite different motivations originally, they all came together forming a consistent theme: an environment-dependent framework to study how ecological networks maintain or change biodiversity in local ecological communities.
Contact
- clsong.ecology@gmail.com
- 33 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02138