Ryan travelled to Salt Lake City, Utah, last week to attend the Ecological Society of America’s Annual Meeting. The theme was “ecology in an era of uncertainty” and the conference was appropriately set against the backdrop of an intense summer heat wave in the US. There were many fascinating presentations and opportunities to interact with colleagues from around the US and across the world.
Our PhD students Sankar Ananthanarayanan, Ho Ning, and Zhu Mingyi attended the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC2026) in Xishuangbanna, China, from 28th June to 3rd July. The theme of this year’s ATBC conference was Achieving a Shared Ecological Civilization for Long-Term Resilience, on which the trio anchored their presentations and showcased their work.
Sankar gave an oral presentation about his work on estimating demographic parameters of the tokay gecko from mark–recapture samples, titled Too Big to Fail: Growth and Survival in a Population of Tokay Geckos (Gekko gecko).
Ho Ning gave an oral presentation about her work on the population variability analysis of green sea turtles in Southeast Asia, titled Evaluating Green Sea Turtle Population Recovery Using Capture-Mark-Recapture and Population Viability Analysis.
Mingyi presented a poster of his work on modelling biodiversity response to habitat fragmentation, with the title Effective Connectivity Curve Predicts Optimal Solutions to the SLOSS Problem in Species-Rich Community. All three presentations received wide attention.
Additionally, former lab intern Aadithi Gopalakrishnan presented work done during her time in the lab in the form of a poster talk. Her presentation on an acoustic sampling approach for straw-headed bulbuls attained high popularity, culminating in Aadithi’s receipt of the ATBC Gentry award for Best Poster. Aadithi’s poster was titled From Songs to Population Estimates: Integrating Passive Acoustic Monitoring and Population Modelling for a Critically Endangered Songbird.
On top of presenting their work, the students actively networked with researchers from around the world, making meaningful connections and creating potential future collaboration opportunities. The conference proved to be an enriching experience.
Joshua Weitz, from the University of Maryland, visited our lab last week. Joshua is a mathematical biologist who studies the ecology and evolution of viruses. He gave a fascinating departmental seminar about how viruses may evolve to have intermediate efficiency at exploiting their hosts, and the implications of this for managing disease outbreaks in human populations. He explores related ideas in his latest book Asymptomatic: The Silent Spread of COVID-19 and the Future of Pandemics, published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Ryan has been promoted to full Professor, effective from January 2026! 🎉
Last week, Ryan travelled to the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany, to attend a workshop on tree community dynamics in species-rich tropical forests. The workshop brought together experts on tropical forests and related areas of ecology from around the world. Ryan gave two presentations, covering topics including our lab’s work on unified theories of biodiversity and on spatial synchrony in tropical tree communities.
Randall has completed his Honours project on species–area relationships for fish communities in freshwater lakes. Tying in with our lab’s previous work on mangrove tree communities, Randall was specifically interested in testing for a flat phase in the species–area relationships for small lake areas. Under a theoretical framework developed in our lab would be interpreted as a niche-structured phase that occurs when immigration is very low. While Randall found evidence of a flat phase in some of his ten datasets, it was not a pervasive phenomenon, which he speculated may be because fish are more effective at dispersing between lakes than we had supposed. Randall will be starting a PhD in the lab in August.
We recently hosted Professor Jedediah Brodie from the University of Montana. Jed’s work concerns global biodiversity conservation and he has a strong research focus in Borneo, where he has carried out extensive field work and conducted modelling to inform planning of protected areas and wildlife corridors. During his visit, Jed gave a departmental seminar and discussed potential research synergies with us.
Last week, Ryan visited the School of BioSciences at the University of Melbourne and the School of Biological Sciences at Monash University. He delivered seminars about the lab’s recent work on the mechanisms maintaining diversity in ecological communities and on Singapore’s history of biodiversity loss.
Last week Professor Wang Shaopeng, from Peking University, visited us to meet with staff and students and to deliver a departmental seminar. Shaopeng is a theoretical ecologist who studies the relationship between biodiversity, ecosystem function and ecosystem stability. In his seminar, Shaopeng discussed, among other topics, his recent work on spatial scaling laws for biodiversity and ecosystem stability.
Our lab recently received a grant from Singapore’s Ministry of Education to build a new framework for biodiversity accounting. The global biodiversity crisis has spurred efforts to quantify the relative biodiversity value of patches of land under different scenarios. Biodiversity accounting can support biodiversity impact assessment, biodiversity footprint estimation, and biodiversity credit market development. The World Economic Forum projects that annual demand for biodiversity credits could reach US$2 billion by 2030 and US$69 billion by 2050. Unfortunately, current frameworks for biodiversity accounting are mostly ad hoc and lead to misleading valuations in some cases. The biodiversity accounting framework we will develop under this new grant will be based on fundamental ecological and economic principles and will ultimately support more scientifically sound allocation of economic resources to protect natural capital.
Ryan is also a Partner Investigator on a recent Australian Research Council grant led by Lynette Loke of the University of Melbourne. The grant aims to scale up their previously successful approach to understanding ecological community diversity using a combined theoretical and experimental approach applied to intertidal systems.
Chisholm Lab 