Program Results

Introduction to the event

Over the four years, we have published a total of 21 SCIE publications. We have focused on developing two main research directions: (1) building ecological models to understand the mechanisms of species coexistence, and (2) examining how plant-soil feedback (PSF) influences plant communities. In terms of teaching, Dr. Ke has committed to introducing theoretical ecology into higher education in Taiwan. To date, he has offered ten related courses and published several journal articles on teaching theoretical ecology.

The attached figure shows our lab’s most recent study, which was just accepted by the journal Ecological Monographs. Continuing our MOE-funded research program (Yushan Young Scholar project), we used theoretical modeling to demonstrate that the decay of plant-soil feedback has critical impact on plant competitive outcomes. Panel A shows a mathematical model developed by our lab to explore how the decay of microbial effects after plant death influences plant coexistence (Ke & Levine, 2021, American Naturalist). Here, we extended this model to a multi-species framework, and parameterized it with empirical data from published studies (Teste et al., 2017, Science). The left figures in panels B and C illustrate that the system is dominated by a single species when microbial effects persist, and repeated simulations show a very low probability of survival for other species. The right figures in panels B and C demonstrate that when microbial effects decay after host death, species can coexist and the diversity increases. Together, these simulations reveal that the decay of microbial effects can fundamentally shift plant competitive outcomes.