LIU Wei

Hi, I am Liu Wei from Beijing Normal University, Beijing, P.R. China. My major is theoretical ecology. I have learned plant reproduction ecology and ESS method.

Now my research interests include two aspects. One is neutral theory, the other is metabolic ecology.

Neutral Theory

As is well known, ecosystem is a complex system and its structure and function are the key problem. It is very important to understand how the community structure formed in ecology. Different from the traditional niche theory, Hubbell's book (2001) gave us a null model assuming that each species is equivalent. In this framework, ecological drift, that is, stochastic factor is emphasized. Based on it, I want to develop a Markovian chain model to predict the outcome of the two same species competition and extend this model to two similar species competition, which is usually called the nearly neutral condition.I hope that multi-agent modeling that will be lectured in summer school will give me some new ideas and be helpful to future work.

Metabolic Ecology

West, Brown and Enquist's great paper which is published in Science in 1997 is elegant. From the general principles of physics and mathematics, they applied ideal model to the biological structure and derived the unique 3/4 law. I have been absorbed in their work. I think it is a milestone in ecology, even in biology. It provides a substantial base to explain the ecological patterns. I expect to do some works in metabolic ecology. Now I have two ideas. One is interpreting the structure of clone plant using ideal model. Another is linking maximal entropy law and metabolic ecology. Because the metabolism is the biological processing of energy and materials, the entropy of focused system must change. There are some interesting questions. What is the direction and whether does the maximal entropy exist? I hope we have chance to talk these ideas in the summer school.