Chuliang Song

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
An environment-dependent framework of ecological networks

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.
Conceptual unification of theoretical approaches

Discontinuity and predictability of ecological assembly

Exploring the full landscape of priority effects with graph theory and algebraic topology
Discontinuity and predictability of ecological assembly

Publications

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Chuliang Song, Lawrence H. Uricchio, Erin A. Mordecai, Serguei Saavedra (2021). Understanding the emergence of contingent and deterministic exclusion in multispecies communities. submitted.

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Chuliang Song, Serguei Saavedra (2021). Bridging parametric and nonparametric measures of species interactions unveils new insights of non-equilibrium dynamics. submitted.

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Simon M. Stump, Chuliang Song, Serguei Saavedra, Jonathan M. Levine, David Vasseur (2021). Synthesizing the effects of individual-level variation on coexistence. Submitted.

Marco Tulio Angulo, Aaron Kelley, Luis Montejano, Chuliang Song, Serguei Saavedra (2021). Coexistence holes characterize the assembly and disassembly of multispecies systems. Nature Ecology and Evolution (* equal contibution).

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Lucas P. Medeiros, Chuliang Song, Serguei Saavedra (2021). Merging dynamical and structural indicators to measure resilience in multispecies systems. Journal of Animal Ecology (* equal contibution).

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Chuliang Song (2020). Structural stability: concepts, methods and applications. Biodiversity Science (in Chinese).

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Chuliang Song, Serguei Saavedra (2020). Telling ecological networks apart by their structure: An environment-dependent approach. PLOS Computational Biology.

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Chuliang Song, Sarah Von Ahn, Rudolf P. Rohr, Serguei Saavedra (2020). Towards a Probabilistic Understanding About the Context-Dependency of Species Interactions. Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

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Chuliang Song, Rudolf P. Rohr, David Vasseur, Serguei Saavedra (2020). Disentangling the effects of external perturbations on coexistence and priority effects. Journal of Ecology.

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Yandong Xiao, Chuliang Song, Liang Tian, Yang-Yu Liu (2019). Accelerating the emergence of order in swarming systems. Advances in Complex Systems.

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Chuliang Song, György Barabás, Serguei Saavedra (2019). On the Consequences of the Interdependence of Stabilizing and Equalizing Mechanisms. The American Naturalist (* equal contibution).

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Chuliang Song, Rudolf P. Rohr, Serguei Saavedra (2019). Beware z-scores. Journal of Animal Ecology.

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Chuliang Song, Rudolf P. Rohr, Serguei Saavedra (2018). A guideline to study the feasibility domain of multi-trophic and changing ecological communities. Journal of Theoretical Biology.

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Simone Cenci, Chuliang Song, Serguei Saavedra (2018). Rethinking the importance of the structure of ecological networks under an environment-dependent framework. Ecology & Evolution (* equal contribution).

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Chuliang Song, Serguei Saavedra (2018). Structural stability as a consistent predictor of phenological events. Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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Chuliang Song, Florian Altermatt, Ian Pearse, Serguei Saavedra (2018). Structural changes within trophic levels are constrained by within-family assembly rules at lower trophic levels. Ecology Letters.

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Chuliang Song, Serguei Saavedra (2018). Will a small randomly-assembled community be feasible and stable?. Ecology.

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Chuliang Song, Rudolf P. Rohr, Serguei Saavedra (2017). Why are some plant-pollinator networks more nested than others?. Journal of Animal Ecology.

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Nojood Almayouf, Elena Bachini, Andreia Chapouto, Rita Ferreira, Diogo Gomes, Daniela Jordão, David Evangelista Junior, Avetik Karagulyan, Juan Monasterio, Levon Nurbekyan, Giorgia Pagliar, Marco Piccirilli, Sagar Pratapsi, Mariana Prazeres, João Reis, André Rodrigues, Orlando Romero, Maria Sargsyan, Tommaso Seneci, Chuliang Song, Kengo Terai, Ryota Tomisaki, Hector Velasco-Perez, Vardan Voskanyan and Xianjin Yang (2016). Existence of positive solutions for an approximation of stationary mean-field games. Involve, a Journal of Mathematics.

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Posts

PhD in numbers

In the near end of my PhD, as a quantitative ecologist, I thought it might be fun to visualize some PhD statistics. Here I am gonna show the record of paper rejections, the diveristy of the journals I published in, and the time series of email exchanges with my advisor.
Last updated on Aug 31, 2020 5 min read Research

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.
Last updated on Apr 14, 2020 17 min read Research

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