Xue Feng

Current interests

My project now revolves around the "sustainability of seasonally dry ecosystems." In more practical terms, I would like study how organisms and people cope (and thrive) in places where the supply of essential water resources (in the form of rainfall) is unpredictable both in terms of the amount and of its temporal distribution. This issue of unpredictability, or randomness in time, is manifested at multiple time scales--from the daily to the interannual--which all compound to the challenge of trying to maximize effective water use.

My latest project is in trying to quantify the level of rainfall seasonality in the tropics by decomposing time series.

Eventually I would like to look at how such rainfall variability, as a dominant ecological force, is propagated through different levels in the ecosystem. And whether a variety of coping strategies, both from nature (e.g., drought avoidance and deciduousness) and from human management (e.g., irrigation, fertilization), can help to stablize the ecosystem against unforeseen extreme events. In other words, how does the diversity of responses contribute to the resilience of the ecosystem?

For modeling, I alternate between Mathematica, Matlab, and Python.

At the summer school, I am very interested in learning more about the types of tools (including many mentioned today in the introductions) in dealing with these kinds of broad problems.

Background

I majored in Mechanical Engineering during college while taking a bunch of biology classes. During graduate school I've veered more toward theoretical frameworks using stochastic models that describes rainfall-soil-vegetation dynamics.

I've lived in Chengdu (China), Sendai (Japan), Nashville, Palo Alto, Durham (U.S.). I squeeze my vacation days to go roaming in wild places. I'm going to check out that trail from St. John's parking lot later this week so let me know if you want to get up a bit earlier and join :)