Source: School of Life Sciences
Written by: School of Life Sciences
Edited by: Wang Dongmei

In recent days, Professor Shixiao Yu and his team from Sun Yat-Sen University have their paper accepted by Ecology Letters, a top international journal in ecology. The paper, “Adult trees cause density-dependent mortality in conspecific seedlings by regulating the frequency of pathogenic soil fungi”, is led by Dr. Minxia Liang, Prof. Yu and Dr. Xubing Liu. It is the third paper published on this journal written by the research team led by Prof. Yu within the last ten years, marking Sun Yat-sen University the most productive Chinese institute on Ecology Letters (based on the affiliation of leading authors and corresponding authors).

The journal, Ecology Letters, is one of the top international journals in academia with its impact factor maintaining above 10. The journal selects and publishes no more than 150 papers annually, implying a fierce competition among research teams around the globe. In the past twenty years, over 20 papers were published on the journal written by Chinese researchers, and the number has been rising in recent years. These papers on Ecology Letters and other key journals in ecology have changed the status of China in the world ecology academia dramatically, while decades ago the country could have minor influence in the world ecology academia.

The question of what determines species diversity in nature was listed as one of the 25 big questions facing science over the next quarter-century by Science. On this frontier scientific question, Prof. Yu and his team have conducted the long-term researches mainly by control experiments and field observations, under the support of NSFC (The National Natural Science Foundation of China). After years of exploring the complicated question, the research team achieves great success. In addition to Ecology Letters, the other top journal, Ecology, accepted and published three papers written by Dr. Xubing Liu, Dr. Minxia Liang and Dr. Yuxin Chen, respectively, from the research team led by Prof. Yu. The journal, being the only two ecology journals in Nature Index with Ecology Letters, published the first paper written by Chinese researchers at its 90th anniversary in 2008. All of these research papers about species diversity are cited by Science, Nature, and other key journals in ecology. In the NSFC-NSF seminar on biodiversity, which was held in October 20 - 22 this year, Prof. Shixiao Yu was invited to give a lecture reviewing the work of his team working on species diversity, which received strong interests from US and Chinese scientists.

More delightfully, the team witnesses the growth of excellent young scientists. Since Prof. Yu with other professors brought the major of ecology to the university in 2004, an increasing number of graduates come up to the world academia. Dr. Xubing Liu and Dr. Minxia Liang, the first and second year’s graduate of the major, respectively, are now cutting splendid figures in the world ecology academia.