Qiang Yang (Marvin)

Research interests

My research interests lie broadly in community ecology including species coexistence, biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and stability. I am particularly fascinated by the relationship among these macroscopic properties. For example, how does the loss of species and alternation of the species interaction within the ecosystem affect its stability? My interests also extend to the application of ecological theories in key species conservation, nature reserve and ecosystem restoration.

PhD research

Funding: Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship

Ecological stability comprises a fundamental property of ecosystems that has hugely important, yet understudied, implications for both ecological theory and the management of natural resources. A challenging aspect of stability is its multidimensionality, including asymptotic stability, resilience, resistance, robustness, persistence and variability. However, few studies that measured multiple components of ecological stability simultaneously considered them as independent and therefore analyzed them separately. My PhD research will explore the mechanisms underpinning relationships among components of stability and whether there are any general features of these relationships that are common across ecosystems. This project aims to address these important and pressing research needs by linking both theoretical research and empirical experiments in the laboratory and the field to address the following key research questions:

1. What are the theoretical relationships among individual components of ecological stability and do they vary with the strength of perturbations?

2. Does environmental context moderate relationships among components of ecological stability?

3. Do different types of perturbations alter the relationships among components of ecological stability in distinct ways?

4. How does dispersal and metacommunity structure moderate the resistance and resilience of ecosystems and the relationships among components of ecological stability?

Publications

Pengling Shi, Hong Shen, Wenjing Wang, Qiang Yang, Ping Xie. (2015) Habitat-specific differences in adaptation to light in freshwater diatoms. Journal of Applied Phycology. DOI: 10.1007/s10811-015-0531-7

Qiang Yang, Ping Xie, Hong Shen, Jun Xu, Peili Wang, Bin Zhang. (2012) A novel flushing strategy for diatom bloom prevention in the lower‐middle Hanjiang River. Water Research, 46(8), 2525-34.

Qiang Yang, Ping Xie, Jun Xu, Hong Shen, Min Zhang, Songbo Wang, Peili Wang. (2011) Research advances of diatom blooms in the rivers. Resources and Environment in the Yangtze Basin, 20(z1), 159‐165. In Chinese.

Jun Xu, Qiang Yang, Min Zhang, Meng Zhang, Ping Xie, L.‐A. Hansson. (2011) Preservation effects on stable isotope ratios and consequences for reconstruction of energetic pathways. Aquatic Ecology, 45(4), 483‐492.

Dawen Zhang, Qiang Yang, Ping Xie, Xuwei Deng, Jun Chen, Ming Dai. (2011) The role of cysteine conjugation in the detoxification of microcystin‐LR in liver of bighead carp (Aristichthys nobilis): a field and laboratory study. Ecotoxicology, 21(1), 244‐252.