It has been a few weeks since the 15th Chinese Symposium on Biodiversity Science and Conservation, where the first “Seminar on Methods in Ecology and Evolution in China” was held. In these blog posts, we hear from some of the winners of the “Outstanding Young Scholar Award in Ecological and Evolutionary Methodology in China”. Here, winner Yi Zou discusses their research.
Post provided by Yi Zou.
I am an associate professor in the Department of Health and Environmental Sciences at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. My research primarily focuses on how changing landscapes affect insect diversity, pollination, and biological pest control services. I am also interested in effectively measuring biodiversity across different dimensions through model simulations and empirical studies.
My research journey began with my PhD in 2010 at UCL, where I investigated how insect diversity changes along environmental gradients. I studied two mega-diverse groups: ground beetles (Coleoptera: Carabidae) and geometrid moths (Lepidoptera: Geometridae). During this work, I quickly realized that sample completeness was a challenge—more species tend to be recorded as more individuals are captured—making it difficult to fairly compare biodiversity between incomplete and inconsistent samples.
While standardized methods exist to address this issue for alpha diversity (which measures species richness), beta diversity (which measures species compositional change) rarely accounts for it. At the time, there was software called Compah96, designed for MS DOS-based systems, that could calculate beta diversity for standardized sample sizes using certain indices. However, this software eventually became unavailable.
Several years after completing my PhD, I revisited these indices and implemented them in R. Together with my PhD supervisor, Professor Jan Axmacher, we evaluated their performance and compared them to other commonly used indices, which led to a publication in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Subsequently, we developed a new index that enables the estimation of the total number of species within a sample, and the total number of species shared between two samples from incompletely sampled communities.
We have now developed an R package, rarestR, which can be downloaded from CRAN. We believe this package is a valuable tool for comparing α- and β-diversity in incomplete samples, particularly for highly mobile and species-rich taxa like insects.
I still define myself as field-based ecologist. While conducting theoretical based research is intellectually stimulating, I believe that bridging empirical fieldwork with rigorous theoretical approaches strengthens our understanding of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning to help us conduct better research.
Post edited by Lydia Morley
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