Mexico & China in da haus!

(Scroll down for Chinese version)

It is with great pleasure that we officially announce the success of two incoming PhD students, Yanru Huang and Brasil Canales-Gordillo, who for different time periods are visiting the Salgo team. Below, a bit about them, their background, and what are working on with us:

 

Yanru Huang

Written by Yanru, revised in English by Fiona

Hello everyone~! My name is Yanru Huang (Fig. 1) and I am delighted to join the SalGo team and the Department of Biology at University of Oxford in 2022-2023. 

 

Fig 1. Yanru at Erhai Lake, Yunnan province, China | 黄滟茹于云南洱海

 

I come from Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China, the city with the greatest concentration of pandas in the world. The city of Chengdu has long been considered the "Land of Heaven" because its fertile soils has provided its people bountiful food and sustained their livelihoods for millennia. The construction of Dujiangyan (an ancient irrigation system) more than 2,000 years ago had long protected this land from floods and droughts, and provided an invaluable resource to grow its agriculture and economy. During my undergraduate studies at Sichuan Agricultural University, I majored in Geographic Information Science. My work has allowed me to view many magnificent system of mountains, rivers, and farmland using modern technologies, namely with drones and remote sensing images (Fig 2). I sensed the unique romance that arises from agriculture and forestry in these artwork-like remote sensing data.

 

Fig 2. The Earth's Palette—Left: Photographs of Yueyang, China (photo by Yanru); Right: Sentinel-2 remote sensing images of Yueyang, China | 大地的调色盘中国岳阳市的照片和Sentinel-2遥感影像

After graduating from my undergraduate, I moved away from my hometown and started a PhD in Cartography and GIS, at the Aerospace Information Research Institute in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. I spent the first year of my PhD at the Yanqi Lake campus in Beijing, which was once dubbed the "closest place to science" in China. In Yanqi Lake, I had the opportunity to interact with some of China's most distinguished scientists and learn about their ground-breaking research. In 2020, I returned to the Key Laboratory of Digital Earth Science in Haidian, Beijing, to continue my PhD research under the supervision of professor Wenjiang Huang from the RSCROP team.

At the early stages of my PhD, the notoriously migratory, polyphagous pest, the fall armyworm (FAW) (Spodoptera frugiperda), was in the process of rapid global invasion hailing from the tropics of America. In 2019, it damaged 1.125 million hectares of crops in China alone. Based on this special timeline that I share with the expansion of the FAW populations, I have made “The Monitoring of Environmental Suitability and Predicting Distribution of Fall Armyworm” as the subject of my PhD study (Fig 3). Using my expertise in remote sensing (sometimes considered the ‘CT scanning’ of the earth’s surface), I was able to detect the insect’s habitat at higher resolutions and in near real time. Combining this knowledge with the FAW’s its biological characteristics and life-history, I have developed models to explore the FAW’s distribution.

 

Fig 3. Three work packages for the research project "the monitoring of environmental suitability and predicting distribution of fall armyworm"; WP1: environmental suitability analysis; WP2: dynamic distribution modelling; WP3: climate change impacts on FAW and its host plants ecological niches | 博士论文课题草地贪夜蛾生境适宜性监测与发生预测研究的三个研究方向;WP1:草地贪夜蛾环境适宜性分析;WP2:草地贪夜蛾动态分布模型;WP3:气候变化对草地贪夜蛾及其宿主植物生态位的影响。

 

Due to global climate change, the problem of pests and disease outbreak is becoming increasingly serious worldwide. Going forward, Rob and I plan to explore the spatio-temporal dynamics of pests, using crowdsourced big data (e.g., GBIF) to predict future trends in pest population growth, expansion and outbreak, and provide information to support long-term pest and disease control decision-making. From an early age, I have been inspired by the classical Chinese saying “every grain of rice is hard to come by”, so I feel a strong motivation to contribute to maintaining food security and biodiversity. I hope to advance techniques and methods of pest monitoring and early warning through the intersection of the disciplines of remote sensing science, ecology and zoology.

I am very happy to have the chance to join the SalGo team and work with you all. Everyone here is enthusiastic, highly motivated and creative, and I have already benefited from every interaction. I look forward to what’s to come in the next year.

 

Chinese translation:

大家好~!我是黄滟茹(图1),很高兴能受中国留学基金委的资助在2022-2023年和大家一起在Salgo团队和牛津大学生物学系学习。

我出生在具有世界上最多熊猫的城市——中国四川省成都市。成都市从古至今都被誉为天府之国,大约2000年前都江堰的建成让这片土地免于洪涝旱灾。岷江的河水源源不断滋润着这片沃土,带来了发达的农业,使这片土地变得富饶。在四川农业大学就读期间,我主修地理信息科学,在无人机和遥感影像中看山川河流和万亩良田,感受到了从播种到收获源自农林业的独特浪漫(图2)。

在大学毕业后,我被中国科学院空天信息创新研究院地图学与地理信息系统专业录取直接攻读博士学位。我在中国科学院大学雁栖湖校区度过了我的博士第一年。在中国离科学最近的地方,我有机会在课堂上、各种讲座与中国最杰出的科学家们交流,了解他们开创性的研究工作2020年,我回到了位于北京海淀的遥感与数字地球重点实验室,在植被遥感机理与病虫害应用团队黄文江研究员的监督下正式开始我的博士学位论文研究工作。

在我刚进入博士阶段时,草地贪夜蛾这种臭名昭著的迁飞性、多食性害虫也正处于它快速全球入侵的过程中。仅在2019年一年时间内,它造成了中国1.125百万公顷的农作物受损。基于这种独特的缘分,我将草地贪夜蛾生境适宜性监测与发生预测研究作为我的博士研究课题(图3),尝试利用我在遥感方面的专业知识,以更高时空分辨率方式获得精细的昆虫栖息地环境条件,并在考虑草地贪夜蛾生物学特性和生活史过程的基础上制定了大范围生境适宜性监测、动态分布预测等研究计划。

由于全球气候变化,病虫害问题在全球似乎变得愈发严峻。下一步,我将和Rob一起,通过探索众源采集的病虫害时空大数据(如GBIF),预测未来病虫害发生发展的趋势,为长期病虫害防治部署提供决策信息支持。随着全球人口持续增加,我们不得不面临未来粮食紧缺的难题。在中国,我从小被教导谁知盘中餐,粒粒皆辛苦遥感技术是地球的“CT”,能将自己的专业知识用于保护粮食安全、生物多样性是一件值得骄傲的事。我希望能通过遥感科学、生态学和动物学的交叉,推进病虫害监测预警的技术和方法的发展。

我非常高兴能有机会加入SalGo团队,这里的每个人都亲切、热情,具有高行动力和创造力,和你们的每次交流我都获益匪浅。我期待能在牛津大学和你们一起度过充实且精彩的一年。

 

 

Brasil Canales-Gordillo

Written by Brasil

Hello everyone. My name is Brasil Canales-Gordillo, and I will join the SalGo team the last three months of 2022.

Fig. 1 Brasil holding a rattlesnake, in the mountains of México City, México. | Brasil抱着一条响尾蛇(摄于墨西哥城的山区)

I am from México City. Mexico City is one of the largest cities in the world; however, it is surrounded by mountains with several endemic species, threatened by human disturbance, mainly land use change. As many cities in the world, Natural areas around México City used to have an amazing biodiversity, however several of them are now extinct in the area and some of them are totally extinct.

Fig. 2 Garter snake near the top of the “Matlacueye” volcano. | Matlacueye火山顶部附近的吊袜带蛇。

 

My research interests are population changes and traits related with sexual selection in amphibians and reptiles. Currently, I am working with the mesquite lizard, Sceloporus grammicus. It is a lizard with large distributional range; from southern USA to south-central Mexico, where this lizard occurs in very different habitats; ranging from low altitude dry scrubs to high altitude wet and cold grassland, and also in urban areas.

 

Fig. 3 S. grammicus in the crack of a rock. | 岩石裂缝中的grammicus

However, the most interesting matter to me is the morphotypes these lizards have: Males of this species can have four principal colour morphs; yellow, orange, blue and grey (these last two morphotypes never co-occur inside the same population), and combinations between pairs of colours, meanwhile females can have yellow, grey and orange morphotypes.

Fig. 4 Morphotypes of male Sceloporus grammicus. A) yellow, B) Orange, C) Grey, D) Blue, E) grey-yellow, F) grey-orange, G) Blue-yellow, H) Blue-Orange. | 雄性 Sceloporus grammicus 颜色形态类型 A) 黄色,B) 橙色,C) 灰色,D) 蓝色,E) 灰黄色,F) 灰橙色,G) 蓝黄色,H) 蓝橙色。

Morphotypes are known to diverge in physiology, morphology, life history and behaviour. The main explanation of the maintenance of polymorphism in natural populations was very well described in the phrynosomatid lizard Uta stansburiana, and it is named frequency dependent selection. In this kind of selection, morphotypes with low relative frequency are predicted to increase in future generations, preventing fixation of one single morphotype in populations.

However, the prevalence of frequency dependent selection along the entire distributional range seems difficult, and could be only possible under very constant environments. That is the reason to ask how are the populations changing related with morphotypes: Is the proportion of morphotypes equal? Is some morphotype more abundant relative to others? Why some morphotypes are better than the others and under what context?

Chinese translation:

大家好,我是Brasil Canales-Gordillo,我将在202210~12月加入SalGo团队。

我来自墨西哥城。墨西哥城是世界上最大的城市之一,它被群山环绕,周围的自然区域拥有令人惊叹的生物多样性。然而,受到人类干扰的威胁,尤其是土地利用的变化,一些物种在该区域逐渐灭绝甚至完全灭绝。

我的研究方向是两栖和爬行动物的种群变化和与性选择有关的性状研究。目前,我的研究对象为条纹强棱蜥(Sceloporus grammicus)。从美国南部到墨西哥中南部,从低海拔的干燥灌丛到高海拔潮湿和寒冷的草地都能发现它的身影,有时它也会出现在城市地区,它的分布范围很广,各区域栖息地类别差异较大。

对我而言最有趣的事情是这些蜥蜴的形态类型。该物种的雄性可以有四种主要的颜色形态类型以及成对的颜色组合:黄色、橙色、蓝色和灰色(后两种形态在同一种群中不同时出现),雌性可以有黄色、灰色和橙色的颜色形态类型。

众所周知,形态类型因生理、形态、生活史和行为而存在差异。自然界种群中多态性维持的一个很好的例子是侧斑鬣蜥(Uta stansburiana),它采用频率依赖性选择的策略。在这种选择中,频率相对低的形态类型在未来几代中将会增加,从而防止种群中单一形态类型的固定。

然而,物种的频率依赖选择只在非常恒定的环境下才可能发生,在整个分布范围内的发生是几乎不太可能的。因此,我们需要了解种群变化与形态类型之间的相互关系;形态类型的比例是否相等; 某些形态类型相对于其他形态类型是否更加丰富;在什么情况下有些形态类型比其他形态类型更具优势。