Kong Fanhua has been a visiting PhD student in our lab for the last year and her first paper has just been published in Forest Ecology and Management. The paper focuses on the Baishanzu 25 ha forest plot in China, which comprises subtropical forest with a mix of patches of different ages and management histories, and a mix of early-, mid- and late-successional tree species. Fanhua’s main result was that tree diversity is higher around early-successional trees, emphasising the importance in forest management of having a variety of species of different successional stages and a variety of stand ages.

Kong, F., X. Chen, M. Zhang, Y. Liu, S. Jiang, R. A. Chisholm, and F. He. 2022. Pioneer tree species accumulate higher neighbourhood diversity than late-successional species in a subtropical forest. Forest Ecology and Management (in press)