Biodiversity history
Reconstructing geological and climate changes effects on historical biodiversity dynamics
Biodiversity, Earth, Climate Coupling in Yunnan (BECCY)
The Hengduan mountains (HDM), as a temperate biodiversity hotspot, hosts a huge amount of diversity, being one of the main “outliers” out of tropics. The complex geological and climate histories have shaping this mountain across milionaire scale while little is known about how these processes shaping diversity due to discipline gaps and lacking of high resolution data. The Biodiversity, Earth, Climate Coupling in Yunnan (BECCY) project is an interdisciplinary project, investigating the geolocal and climate processes in driving biodiversity patterns of plant and fishes in the Hengduan Mountains.
Global drivers of mountain plant diversity
Mountains exhibit disproportionately high biodiversity of terrestrial organisms, which has long fascinated natural scientists and generated questions regarding the underlying processes. My project is aimed to provide a holistic view that explicitly incorporates geological, climatic, and biological processes at a fine spatial resolution, to understand the processes that have shaped contemporary patterns of plant biodiversity across global mountain systems through time.
SedaDNA studies have the potential to revolution the study of ecosystem changes and relate ecological processes to organism abundance changes over time. The method overcomes the limitation of taxonomic resolution of pollen and scarcity of macrofossils allowing more precise composition information for plants, but also allows for extracting information on animals. SedaDNA can be extracted from lake sediment cores at different depth of the core and the sediment can be used for DNA extraction followed by amplify DNA fragments of interest using PCR methods (metabarcoding) before sequencing.