On the 21st of September 2022, three members of the LEMONTREE team presented their optimality-based talks at the 21st China Ecology Congress held by the Ecological Society of China. This annual conference is held in Guiyang and had over 300 oral presentations.
The team are led by Dr Wang Han, the principal investigator of LPICEA (Lab of Plant Interactions: Climate, Environment and Atmosphere) at Tsinghua University. These three PhD students from LPICEA presented their recent research.
Ziqi Zhu’s research is focused on explaining the long- term impact of climate factors on vegetation greenness from first principles. Developing a novel water-constraint eco-evolutionary optimality theory to quantify the weakening responses of vegetation greenness to environmental changes in the past 35 years across the Tibetan Plateau. He gave a presentation at the conference titled: “Optimality principles explaining divergent responses of alpine vegetation to environmental change.” This talk was based on a paper that has very recently been accepted by Global Change Biology: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.16459
You can read more on this paper in our blog post
Yanghan Ren’s PhD research aims at developing a next-generation LSM (Land Surface Model) incorporating EEO (Eco Evolutionary Optimality), with a focus on the theory of plant respiration acclimation and how that affects land-atmosphere interactions. She gave a talk titled: “Night-time temperature and optimal photosynthetic capacity over the past fortnight jointly control the acclimation of leaf respiration.”
Shengchao Qiao is interested in crop growth simulation and studying the response of crop growth to environmental conditions and management practices, and how food production might be affected by future climate scenarios. He extended Pmodel to agricultural science for modelling crop yield and developed the PC model (C for crop) with parsimonious parameters but perform as well as the complex process-based crop models. He gave a talk titled: “Optimality-based modelling of wheat sowing dates globally.”
All three gave outstanding talks and were awarded certificates for their excellent oral presentations. Less than 15% of those that presented were awarded, and so it was a real triumph that all three representing LEMONTREE and our optimality-based research were recognized.
Huge congratulations to these PhD students and the LPICEA team.
©WangHan.