The OceanMatters Lab
The OceanMatters Lab - Exploring principles of interactions among marine species, human activities, and management policies
Marine Conservation Research Lab
We are a Marine Conservation Research Lab based in the School of Ecology, Sun Yat-Sen University. We investigate novel approaches that disentangle the complexities of marine systems and human societies. Our research is supported by funding from the government and a number of foundations.
Research
Primary Areas of Interest
Understanding distributions and abundance of rare marine species
Rare marine species are often poorly known due to their ecological traits (e.g. cryptic, low population density, small range), but these groups are the backbone for biodiversity conservation and often serve as flagship species. My lab focus on understanding both natural and human-derived drivers that determine the geographic distributions and abundance variation of rare marine species, including rare fishes, mammals, seabirds, etc. We use unconventional data sources (e.g. fishers' local ecological knowledge, citizen science, chronicles) and cutting-edge techniques (e.g. ecological niche modeling, GIS, data mining, machine learning) to answer the following two sets of fundamental questions:
a. Where are the species located? how abundant they are in different locations?
b. What are the ecological processes and drivers?
Quantifying human impacts upon marine life
Anthropogenic activities have become a growing driver in shaping biodiversity patterns at various spatio-temporal scales. Building quantitative models to assess the cumulative human impact (CHI) and mapping human footprints on the marine realm is challenging but highly needed for marine spatial planning and conservation. We are interested in integrating multiple data and knowledge with statistical models to solve this problem. A key issue is that species respond to human activities differently and different species also have various response curves to the same pressure. This implicates that we often need to quantify such CHI on a species base while doing that at the ecosystem level. My team pioneers in developing useful CHI models to address the following essential management and conservation questions:
a. Where marine life are impacted most? What are the key stressors?
b. How would the impact change in the future under different management scenarios?
