Yang Shen

PhD project: Macroevolution of mutualistic interactions on islands
(January 2021 - present, jointly supervised with L. Valente, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Netherlands)

Islands are seen as "natural laboratories" by many biologist, ecologists and geologists as they help understand global scale biodiversity patterns with a relatively isolated status. The flora and fauna of islands is particularly interesting to study because within such well-defined borders, enabling ecologists to capture macroevolutionary dynamics and step to study community assembly. Species in ecological communities are embedded in networks of interacting species. Using the concept "networks" to engage two entities (usually plant and animal species in mutualistic interaction) improves the analysis of ecological interspecies interaction mechanism. On an evolutionary scale, species immigrating from mainland and successfully establishing on island are influenced by multiple factors. These inner or outer reasons are mainly related to affect the rates of immigration, speciation and extinction. Here we construct a species dynamic model on island involved mutualism and consider these three processes (i.e. immigration, extinction and speciation). With this approach, we are aiming to understand mutualism on evolutionary scale and to study how mutualism affect species assembly on island.