Chuliang Song

Chuliang Song

(Incoming) Asssistant Professor

University of California, Los Angeles

Biography

I am a theoretical and computational ecologist. My research program aims to forecast the dynamics of ecological systems under unforeseen environmental conditions, and under incomplete information about the entire system. To this end, my work centers on developing rigorous theory through interdisciplinary tools, devising monitoring-applicable metrics, and validating these approaches with empirical data from a broad range of ecosystems.

I will join the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) as an Assistant Professor in Summer 2024. I am currently a postdoc with Jonathan Levine at Princeton University. I was previously a postdoc co-supervised by 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.

I am currently a subject-matter editor at Ecological Monographs and a data editor at Ecology Letters. I have served as a council member of Ecological Society of America and as the secretary of Theoretical Ecology Section.

You can reach me via email: clsong.ecology AT gmail DOT com.

Interests

  • Species coexistence
  • Priority effects
  • Spatial ecology
  • Effective biomonitoring

Education

  • PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2016 - 2020

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • BSc in Mathematics, 2013 - 2016

    Zhejiang University

Projects

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Biomonitoring from incomplete surverys

Biomonitoring from incomplete surverys

How to make robust assessment when only small subsets of ecosystems can be monitored

Conceptual unification of theoretical approaches

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

Discontinuity and predictability of ecological assembly

Exploring the full landscape of priority effects with graph theory and algebraic topology

Species coexistence under changing environment

Species coexistence under changing environment

How the architecture of species interactions affects species coexistence in fluctuating environemnts

Statistical physics for ecological time series

Statistical physics for ecological time series

Combing theory and theory to identify the structure of ecological dynamics

Publications

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Yuxin Wang, Tongjun Zhang, Jayna Raghwani, Yidan Li, Yanchao Cheng, Chuliang Song, Guha Dharmarajan, Lu Dong, Hua Tan, Christina L. Faust, Ziyan Liu, Peiyi Wu, Yuyang Chen, Yunyu Tian, Yiting Xu, Qiang Liu, Jianhui Qu, Shen Li, Jing Wei, Chaofeng Ma, Nita Bharti, Bernard Cazelles, Xiaohua Zhou, Ruifu Yang, Oliver G. Pybus, Andrew P. Dobson, Pengbo Yu, Nils Chr. Stenseth, Huaiyu Tian (2023). Landscape ecological consolidations as the game-changer for zoonotic host diversity in human habitats. submitted.

Chuliang Song, Jürg W. Spaak (2023). Multitrophic assembly: a perspective from modern coexistence theory. submitted.

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Hangyu Wu, Weitao Wang, Tingting Wu, Zijing Luo, Wei Lin, Hanlun Liu, Junli Xiao, Wenqi Luo, Yuanzhi Li, Youshi Wang, Chuliang Song, Gaurav Kandlikar, Chengjin Chu (2023). Soil microbial influences over coexistence in multispecies plant communities in a subtropical forest. submitted.

Frederik De Laender, Camille Carpentier, Timoteo Carletti, Chuliang Song, Samantha L. Rumschlag, Michael B. Mahon, Marie Simonin, Géza Meszéna, György Barabás (2023). Mean species responses predict effects of environmental change on coexistence. Ecology Letters.

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Chuliang Song, Muyang Lu, Joseph R. Bennett, Benjamin Gilbert, Marie-Josée Fortin, Andrew Gonzalez (2023). Reconceptualizing beta diversity: a hypervolume geometric approach. submitted.

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Chuliang Song, Benno Simmons, Marie-Josée Fortin, Andrew Gonzalez, Christopher Kaiser-Bunbury, Serguei Saavedra (2023). Rapid monitoring of ecological persistence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Chuliang Song, Marie-Josée Fortin, Andrew Gonzalez (2022). Metapopulation persistence can be inferred from incomplete surveys. Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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Chuliang Song, Benno I. Simmons, Marie-Josée Fortin, Andrew Gonzalez (2022). Generalism drives abundance: a computational causal discovery approach. PLOS Computational Biology.

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Chuliang Song, Tadashi Fukami, Serguei Saavedra (2021). Untangling the complexity of priority effects in multispecies communities. Ecology Letters.

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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. Ecological Monographs.

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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. Ecology Letters.

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

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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

Resources for ecology faculty application

The process of finding a faculty position is, to say the least, challenging and not fun. Listed below are some resources that I’ve found helpful in navigating this path. I cannot overstate my gratitude towards those who generously shared their wisdom.
Last updated on Nov 1, 2023 4 min read Research

A Latex Template for (Quantitative) Ecology Manuscript

Why LaTeX LaTeX has become increasingly popular for writing academic paper in ecology. I almost exclusively write in LaTeX. My main reasons are LaTeX is so much easier to use than Word for quantitative research.
Last updated on Oct 26, 2021 3 min read Research

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

Join us!

Our lab currently has openings for graduate students and postdoc scholars!

For prospective graduate students:

The lab has openings for 1-2 PhD students who are passionate about ecology with a strong quantitative background. The lab accepts students through the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at UCLA. The deadline for application is December 1st. More information about the program can be found on this page www.eeb.ucla.edu/doctoral-program/.

Our lab believes in fostering a space where students can chase their research curiosities and passions. To ensure a symbiotic mentor-mentee relationship, we hope your interests resonate with one or more of the following: species coexistence, priority effects/community assembly, eco-evolutionary dynamics, ecological time series, and spatial pattern analysis.

Selecting an advisor that suits your interests and needs is critical to being happy and successful. I’d appreciate the opportunity to connect before applying. To start a conversation, please drop me an email with:

  • Your CV
  • An unofficial transcript
  • Research interests (including why you want to work in this lab)

For prospective postdoc scholars:

If you’re interested in joining the lab, please email me a description of your research interests, goals for your postdoc and a CV with contact information for 2-3 references to start a conversation.

Contact