Landscape Ecology - Shifts in Ecological Patterns and Processes under Global Changes
Guest Editors
Songlin Fei, Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
Mingzhen Lu, Santa Fe Institute, NM, USA
Lifei Wang, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Toronto Scarborough, ON, Canada
Qinfeng Guo, USDA Forest Service, Southern Research Station, Asheville, NC, USA
Lixin Wang, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), School of Science, IN, USA
Themes & Objectives
Ecosystems around the globe are facing increased demand for ecosystem services due to the fast-expanding human population. At the same time, they are challenged by the rapidly changing climate, extensive biological invasions, and dynamic changes of land use (e.g., deforestation and urbanization), threatening their long-term sustainability or even their sheer existence. A large number of studies have documented the impacts of global change on ecosystems worldwide, such as rapid losses of biodiversity, structural and compositional changes, and shifts of plant phenology, to name a few.
Given that ecosystems near or far are inherently coupled biologically (e.g., migration) and environmentally (e.g., biogeochemical cycling), changes in one ecosystem could have strong or weak effects on the others at various scales. More importantly, the aggregating effects resulting from within- and cross-scale interactions of these changes could lead to dramatic regime shifts in ecological patterns when certain thresholds/tipping points are crossed.
Understanding regime shifts in ecological patterns—from landscape to continental scales—is thus not only scientifically intriguing, but also crucial for our efforts to effectively manage ecosystems and to develop adaptive strategies. In this special issue, we seek to understand the impacts of global changes (individually or collectively) on the shifts of existing ecological patterns or the emergence of novel ecological patterns in terrestrial and aquatic systems from landscape to global scales.
Contributions in this collection will cover the following three major topic areas:
- Shifts of ecological patterns in terrestrial systems
- Shifts of ecological patterns in aquatic systems
- Impacts of global changes on ecosystem processes
EXPECTED PUBLICATION: Late 2023
About the Guest Editors
Dr. Songlin Fei, Professor and Dean's Chair of Remote Sensing at the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, Purdue University heads the Natural Resources Spatial Analysis Lab. The NRSA Lab focuses on the application of geospatial methods to address current ecological and environmental challenges. His academic interests are forest ecology, invasion ecology, and geospatial analysis. Please read more about Dr. Fei’s academic background here (this opens in a new tab).
Dr. Mingzhen Lu, Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow and Omidyar Fellow at Santa Fe Institute, is a member of Sigma Xi, Ecological Society of America, and the American Geophysical Union. His research interest is understanding how empirical regularities across the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems, especially their component biology and elements cycling, can be understood from the perspectives of cooperation, feedback, and geometry at the causal level. Dr. Lu hopes to improve our ability to project the future trajectories of terrestrial ecosystems and hopefully the entire Earth system with improved casual understanding. He is currently collaborating with researchers in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University to identify new policy solutions for maximizing land carbon storage. Please read more about Dr. Lu’s academic background here (this opens in a new tab).
Dr. Lifei Wang is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Toronto Scarborough. Her main research interests include species distribution modeling, time series modeling, aquatic and fisheries ecology, aquatic invasive species ecology, and aquatic heavy metal pollution. Please read more about Dr. Wang's academic background here (this opens in a new tab).
Dr. Qinfeng Guo, Research Ecologist at USDA Forest Service, Southern Research Station currently researches biological invasions (patterns, processes, and mechanisms of biotic invasions at the population and community levels); community ecology/biogeography; and biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Please read his full biography here (this opens in a new tab).
Dr. Lixin Wang is Associate Professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), School of Science. His general research interests are studying spatial and temporal patterns of water and nitrogen availability, how vegetation adapts to and affects such patterns, and how future climate/land use changes affect vegetation-resources interactions. Please read more about his research interests here (this opens in a new tab).
Keep up with the latest Landscape Ecology content by signing up for Journal Alerts today (this opens in a new tab)!