Honored that our paper (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) received this year’s Outstanding Paper Award from the ESA Theory Section! It was also such a wonderful surprise to meet Angie Volterra, Vito Volterra’s granddaughter, and hear her speak about his life beyond academia.

guanyangwang.github.io/blog/mathema... A fun and thought-provoking piece to digest

Happening at 4:15 PM!

Chuliang Song@clsong.com · last wk.

3/4 Dillon Max will present new work showing how standard plant-soil feedback models may have significantly underestimated species coexistence. 🗓 Wednesday, Jul 29 | 4:15 PM 📍 Room 251A 🔗 planion.events/e/esa/am2026...

Happening early in the morning tomorrow. Early bird gets the best talk!

Chuliang Song@clsong.com · last wk.

2/4 Zhiru Guoli will present a new geometric measure of functional richness that overcomes key limitations of previous metrics. 🗓 Wednesday, Jul 29 | 8:15 AM 📍 Room 250C 🔗 planion.events/e/esa/am2026...

Happening in an hour!

Chuliang Song@clsong.com · last wk.

1/4 Mingyu Luo will present on a novel geometrical framework to analyze ecosystem resilience 🗓 Tuesday, Jul 28 | 4:00 PM 📍 Room 251F 🔗 planion.events/e/esa/am2026...

We are at #ESA2026! Our group is presenting some very exciting work across theoretical and quantitative ecology throughout the week. 🧵👇

New preprint with @biologyjoe87.bsky.social and Jürg Spaak: a mathematically rigorous method for building community assembly graphs from Lotka-Volterra models, which map which species coexist and how single species introductions shift community composition. 1/14 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Maybe too obvious to be worth saying, but: frontier models are now obviously superhuman at some mathematical tasks, including ones that the profession has, historically, rewarded with prestige etc.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A great paper by three leading experts on this topic (also super cool figures!

From Lotka-Volterra Dynamics to Community Assembly: Theory, Topography, and Empirical Applications

1. Community assembly graphs (CAGs) summarize which species combinations can coexist and how single-species invasions drive transitions between them, encoding the pathways, alternative endpoints, and...

biorxiv.org

Very proud of this project! @oscar-godoy.bsky.social @langa71.bsky.social

American Naturalist / ASN 🐌@asn-amnat.bsky.social · 3w ago

Godoy et al. explored whether cooperation gives rise to mechanisms of coexistence that competition does not promote and found that cooperation promotes three unique mechanisms that diversify the pathways to coexistence. Read now ahead of print! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

The first article of my PhD is published in @ecol-evol.bsky.social! doi.org/10.1002/ece3...

Species Accumulation Stabilizes the Synchronous Responses to the Environment of Vertebrate Communities Worldwide

How species number, synchrony, species life strategies, and environmental conditions interact and contribute to community stability is still unclear. We compiled a worldwide dataset of time series fr...

doi.org

Now out in Ecology Letters 🥳

Using Modern Coexistence Theory to Understand Community Disassembly

Community disassembly examines how extinctions reshape ecological communities. Here, we introduce the community disassembly graph, which uses invasion growth rates (IGRs) to identify extinction-drive....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Joe Brennan@biologyjoe87.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Excited to share a new pre-print in collaboration with @sebastianschreiber.bsky.social, "Using Modern Coexistence Theory to understand community disassembly"! We set out to understand how techniques used to study coexistence can be extended to understand community disassembly. (1/X)

Interested in joining a growing lab in LA? We’re hiring a postdoc!! Please spread the word to folks in your network and feel free to get in touch with any questions recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF11142

I am incredibly thrilled to announce that I will be starting as an Assistant Prof at Yale EEB in January 2027!! 🎉🎊 Stay tuned for student and postdoc openings, and please feel free to reach out to me if you are interested in eco-evo, range dynamics, species interactions, and global change! 🌐🌱🦠🧬

To the #Evol2026 folks, I am recruiting MSc/PhD students (with or without their own funding) - please send people my way if you know of anyone interested in blending ecology & evolution!

New paper out @pnas.org: We explore why fly wings evolve along "lines of least resistance" and reconcile the "rate paradox" between population variation and divergence. Check out how a low dimensional model of selection on size explains it all: www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

These two papers, led by Pablo Lechón-Alonso, are absolutely beautiful. They settle questions I’ve wondered about since grad school, using genuinely novel mathematical tricks. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...; www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Emergent feasibility in random ecological systems with higher-order interactions

A recurring lesson from random ecological models is that coexistence is hard to come by: in the Generalized Lotka-Volterra (GLV) model with pairwise interactions, the probability that randomly sampled...

biorxiv.org

🚨 New preprint! What happens to bumblebee pollination networks as species ranges shift due to climate change? 🐝🪻🕸️ In the Rocky Mountains, we predict these networks are becoming "vertically disassembled" as the ranges of interacting species shift upward in elevation at different rates.

Spent the last two years developing a new Intro to Physics course for undergrad biology majors. It features tons of examples from biology (especially Ecology & Evolution!) and requires only middle school-level math. Lecture note here shorturl.at/0PiVp Any comments or feedback are highly welcome!

slowly catching up on papers published while I was on mat leave, and I really enjoyed this one—a whimsical perspective piece on whether it really means anything in biology to base models on "first principles" doi.org/10.1016/j.tr...

𝚒 𝚖𝚊𝚍𝚎 𝚜𝚘𝚖𝚎 𝚜𝚕𝚒𝚍𝚎𝚣 𝚝𝚘 𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚗𝚎𝚠 𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚞𝚕𝚝 𝚘𝚗 𝚑𝚘𝚠 𝚍𝚛𝚒𝚏𝚝 𝚊𝚕𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚜 𝐆-𝚖𝚊𝚝𝚛𝚒𝚡 𝚘𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚠𝚑𝚢 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚖𝚊𝚝𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚜 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚎𝚟𝚘𝚕𝚞𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚊𝚛𝚢 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚔𝚒𝚗𝚐 ;-; 𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚌𝚔 𝚞𝚖 𝚘𝚞𝚝 ⋆˚꩜｡ bobweek.github.io/talks/driftG...

New paper out today in Ecology Letters! We use Modern Coexistence Theory and Metabolic Theory to get general predictions for the effect of temperature on competition. Led by brilliant postdoc @kaleighedavis.bsky.social and @joeybernhardt.bsky.social, with Po-Ju Ke, Patrick Thompson and Mary O'Connor

General Predictions for the Effects of Warming on Competition

We combined two major theories in ecology to investigate whether warming may have general effects on competition for shared resources. We found that species' niche and fitness differences both decrea...

dx.doi.org

Our paper on transient dynamics and nonlinear fitness it out in Ecology! We present a matrix framework that links pulse (one-time) and press (sustained) perturbations, showing how transient nonlinearities and demography shape fitness. (1/3) esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Transient dynamics and nonlinear fitness: A matrix approach to pulse and press perturbation

Disturbances can occur as short-lived pulses (e.g., storms) or sustained presses (e.g., chronic drought). Much work in ecology has developed methods to help predict how natural populations respond to...

esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

new diamond open-access Journal of Statistical Ecology launched 🎉🎉🎉 jse.centre-mersenne.org @fredbarraquand.bsky.social @oaggimenez.bsky.social @marieaugermethe.bsky.social @vianeylb.bsky.social (apologies to any Bsky editors I missed)

What have we actually learned from empirical applications of Modern Coexistence Theory? We reviewed 84 studies from the last two decades to find out. Read our new synthesis in Ecology Letters here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

For this month's GBE Highlight, SMBE Fellow Haoran Cai delves into Adey et al., who investigated the role of pervasive transcription in the human genome. @haorancai.bsky.social 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evag104 #genome #evolution #highlight

Peter Scholze (left) and Dustin Clausen are undertaking an ambitious project to generate an entire new category of mathematical objects. Their work retains all of the best parts of topological spaces — without the drawbacks. www.quantamagazine.org/two-research...

I’m looking forward to presenting my project on the puzzles of fly wings evolution at the Evol-Mut-Circle seminar Tuesday, May 19th at 11:00 AM EDT/3:00 PM UTC molevol.org/2025/12/08/e... DM me for the Zoom info, or reach out to Arlin Stoltzfus (evolarlin@gmail.com) to sign up for the email list!

bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology@biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · 6mo ago

A pleiotropic hitchhiking model recapitulates alignments between fly wing divergence and variation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.19.706930v1

This paper makes an interesting claim about the identifiably of multivariate effects in ecological models. But unfortunately, its characterization of our recent work (arxiv.org/abs/2602.16937) is very misleading. 1/2

Graphs are maximally expressive for higher-order interactions

We demonstrate that graph-based models are fully capable of representing higher-order interactions, and have a long history of being used for precisely this purpose. This stands in contrast to a commo...

arxiv.org

Violeta Calleja Solanas@violetacalleja.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Check out our full manuscript: "Higher-order interactions in ecology can be hidden in plain sight" arxiv.org/pdf/2605.06301 Can we actually infer their presence just by looking at species abundance time-series? We built an idealized computational pipeline to find out... the surprising answer is no!

Our paper entitled "The persistence and loss of hard selective sweeps amid admixture in ancient Eurasians" is now out in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1.... A really fun and informative collaboration with @mharris.bsky.social, Ziyi Mo and Adam Siepel. (1/n)

The persistence and loss of hard selective sweeps amid admixture in ancient Eurasians | PNAS

The extent to which human adaptations have persisted throughout history despite strong eroding demographic events such as admixture, genetic drift,...

pnas.org