People

I am excited about the propect of  a universal theory in ecology so throughout my Ph.D I work hard towards it.  Impressed by the power of maximum entropy (MaxEnt) as an alternative approach to develop predictive models, I use it as the basis of my theory.  The theory starts from one simple scenario of resource allocation and simultaneously predicts a number of things that previously can only be addressed by multiple independent theories, i.e. species coexistence, community energy distribution, population growth function and trophic interaction. In addition to a new way of defining information entropy, I introduced to the classic framework of MaxEnt an element that represents individual variability within each species, i.e. individual distinguishability, which has been believed to be key to solving the unexplained variations in population and community dynamics, and which indeed greatly expands the predictions  far beyond those of the existing ecological theories.  A diversity of datasets across taxa and biomes will be used to test the theory.