Ecological Communities in a Changing World
News
We are looking for 2 PhD students (fall 2025) and 1-2 postdocs (start date flexible) to join us.
2025
- 04/05-04/11: Daijiang went to iDiv in Germany to attend a workshop in relating long-term resurvey data and biodiversity experiments.
- 03/18: Our working group on urban species invasions was selected for funding by ESIIL, a NSF supported Environmental Data Science Innovation & Inclusion Lab.
- 02/21: How would extreme weather events (EWEs) affect phenology? Check out our paper just published at Nature Climate Change.
- Press release at University of Arizona
- 02/10: Pablo just published a paper on specialization of pollinators! Congrats!
- 01/22: iNaturalist hosted a webinar on plant phenology annotations, partly supported by the Phenobase project. Watch the record at YouTube here. And check out the comments there!
2024
- 11/26: Graduate student Rohit’s paper on the impacts of Water Hyacinth was accepted by Biological Invasions! Congrats!
- 10/19: Latest lab paper on long-term dynamics of N-fixing plant diversity led by Pablo was published at Science Advances!
- 10/14-10/19: Daijiang co-led a working group at iDiv in Germany to work on species invasions in urban areas across the world.
- 10/10: Daijiang gave a talk about phenoBase in the WeDigBio 2024 online symposium “How is AI being used in Biodiversity Efforts?”
- 10/09: Pablo gave a talk about plant-pollinator interactions in a symposium organized at PSU.
- 10/02-10/05: Daijiang attended the Urban Eco-Evol and Nature-based solution workshop in the University of Washington.
- 08/05: Daijiang and Grant attended ESA2024 in Long Beach. Daijiang co-hosted a special session on the effects of extreme weather events on ecosystems; Grant presented a poster on patterns and drivers of non-native plant species across the US.
- 06/16: Daijiang attended Botany 2024 and co-hosted a workshop on Biodiversity Data Wrangling: Linking large phylogenies with species traits and ecologies with Ryan Folk and Rob Guralnick.
- 06/09: Daijiang attended a workshop hosted by iDigBio at the Peabody museum of the Yale University.
- 05/05: 📢 the lab is moving to the EEB department at the University of Arizona this fall. We are grateful for all the support received at LSU and it is hard to say goodbye to so many great colleague and friends! We will look for graduate students and postdocs. Keep in touch if you are interested in joining us!!
- 04/30: 🍾 🎉 Daijiang was named as an Early Career Fellow of the Ecological Society of America.
- 01/19: 👋 We started our new semester by welcoming a new lab member Nevyn Neal. Nevyn joined the lab as a PhD student to work on applying deep learning methods to extract phenological information from images.
2023
Three years in, and we finally had a chance to take an in-person lab group picture (05/05)! It has been a really challenging journey so far but I am glad that we have a great team now. Left to right: Ariel Mata, Sydne Martin, Tina Nguyen, Daijiang Li, Rohit Jha, Pablo Moreno, Evelin Reyes, Flavia Montaño.
- 10/30: Daijiang gave a department seminar at Washington University at St. Louis and met many great scientists there.
- 10/12: Daijiang visited University of Dayton to gave a department seminar there and to meet with some excellent people there.
- 09/25: Daijiang co-led the first in person meeting of the sGUBIK working group at iDiv in Germany. We had a really great week of productive discussion and multiple great projects planned on the horizon.
- 08/20: 🎉 🎉 REU student Emily’s poster won one of the best posters at CCT. CCT will support her to present it in a national conference next year! Congrats!!
- 08/14: Two of us (Daijiang and Pablo) went to the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Portland, Oregon and had a great conference there to hear about the new work in the field and to connect with colleagues.
- 08/03: 🎉 🎉 Evelin got an Underground Explorers grant from SPUN to sample soil fungi communities in Honduras. Congrats!!
- 07/23: Daijiang went to the Morton Arboretum and had a great week there working with collaborators on a future grant proposal.
- 07/07: 🎉 🍦 The lab got a NSF award to work on the eco-evo drivers of nitrogen fixing plants 🌿 and soil microbial symbiosis at continental scales!
- 07/01: 👋 Welcome Dr. Yu (Grant) Liu to the lab as a postdoc! Grant will work on species invasions with NEON data and advanced statistical models.
- 05/31: 🎉 🎉 Huge congratulations to postdoc Flavia, who will start her own lab as an Assistant Professor here at LSU soon!
- 05/22: 👋 We welcome a new member, Emily Ramos, into the lab this summer. Emily is from the Fordham University and will work with us as a REU student this summer!
- 05/02: 🍾 Daijiang received the non-tenured faculty research award from the College of Science!
- 04/24: We had our first in person PI meeting for our #NSFfunded Phenobase project at LSU! We are really excited to work with this great team on a super important project.
- 02/28: Paper accepted at Ecography!
- 02/01: Daijiang attended a workshop organized by the Urban Eco-Evo Network at the University of Washington; lots of exciting ideas regarding 🏙️️ urban eco-evo dynamics 🏙️️ to think about.
2022
- 11/23: 🍾 Paper led by Flavia was published at Global Ecology and Biogeography!
- 10/21: 📢 Our lab has two new postdoc positions opening: one on species invasions and one on deep learning and ontology development. Please apply if interested.
- 10/20: Daijiang was interviewed by KSLA TV Station regarding the Phenobase project.
- 10/12: 🍾 Our proposal to synthesize urban invasion ecology was funded by iDiv (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research)! Lots of exciting projects to be done with a large group of collaborators!
- 09/01: 🍾 The lab is officially #NSFfunded today! We are going to work on a project to study species invasions with advanced statistical models and to work on a project to build a global database of plant phenology (PhenoBase) by integrating existing phenological records and adding new records using deep learning approaches.
- 08/26: Daijiang participated in the Urban Eco-Evo and Long-Term Ecology working group at the beautiful Sevilleta Field Station in New Mexico.
- 08/22: Welcome Rohit and Linta to the lab as the latest graduate students! We are excited to have both of you here!
- 06/15: The lab is growing! We welcome Pablo to our lab as postdoc! Pablo will work on plant-pollinator related projects and we are so excited!
- 01/05: Flavia officially joined the lab as a postdoc! Welcome Fla!
2021
- 10/12: We are looking for 2 PhD students to start 2022 fall (Job ad here)! Reach out if you are interested.
- 09/22: Welcome Sofia and Alexis to the lab! We are very excited to have your here.
- 08/11: Evelin Reyes joined us as a PhD student! Welcome Evelin! Cannot wait to do some exciting science together!
- 02/20: Our paper about flower duration was on the cover of Global Change Biology, check it out!
- 02/01: Matt Blanchard joined the lab as a Research Associate. Welcome!
2020
- 11/15: We have one lab technician position opening. Please apply if you are interested.
- 11/23: We have one postdoc position opening! Check it out and let’s do some exciting work together!
- 11/10: We have two fully funded PhD student positions in the lab. Students will be able to follow their research interests. Please get in touch if you are interested.
- 08/15: 🚀 🚀 🚀 the lab is opening at August 15th, 2020 at LSU!! Feel free to contact me to discuss about opportunities! 🎆 🎉 🎊