Chuliang Song

Very grateful to the editorial board for the opportunity to write about a topic I care deeply about. This review is deliberately opinionated, a personal view of where theory in community ecology stands and where it might go next. Pushback and disagreement are very welcome! doi.org/10.1146/annu...

Second chapter now up as a pre-print 🥳. @sebastianschreiber.bsky.social and I set out to understand when and why the order of extinction can lead to different disassembled communities, known as an inverse priority effect (1/6)

New paper out today! A beautifully simple experiment led by awesome undergrad Emma Gruntz showing how a single heatwave event can have long-lasting effects on population dynamics, caused first by reduced fecundity and then by increased mortality. @royalsocietypublishing.org doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

A very clear and interesting way to categorize research approaches in community ecology! A lot of food for thoughts Song, C. (2026). Toward a Conceptual Commons for Theory in Community Ecology. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. doi.org/10.1146/annu... @clsong.com

[new paper] Animal Pollination Under Human-Induced Rapid Environmental Change www.annualreviews.org/content/jour... Writing this review was really inspiring, and it was a pleasure to work with two young talented scientists @blancaac.bsky.social and @nermonper.bsky.social cc @ebdonana.bsky.social

In our new perspective paper @pnas.org, we show how the comments you put in eBird/iNaturalist can help ecologist with collecting much-needed data on species interactions: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

good morning. I strongly suspect that we don't really know (or agree) what geographic ranges are, and therefore, our estimates of how species' ranges are shifting in the Anthropocene are uninterpretable. I wrote something about this: doi.org/10.1111/2041... and I'll share the main findings...

My PhD advisor Serguei Saavedra has assembled an amazing Editorial to launch a new free-to-read, free-to-publish journal in ecology!

A wonderful review by Stefano on 100 years of Lotka–Volterra models. Don’t miss the incredibly detailed Supplement, truly the “War and Peace” of LV models. I really wish it had existed when I was a grad student! doi.org/10.1146/annu...

📣We will soon be back for a new run of open online theoretical ecology seminars! We have six exciting speakers covering topics from all corners of the field to add to your calendars: In the meantime, there are 80+ previous talks on our YouTube 📺: www.youtube.com/@theoretical... See you there!

Now out @molbioevol.bsky.socialGenetic correlations summarize how traits covary, but they can hide different underlying architectures. Distinguishing those architectures can reveal distinct mechanisms generating—and potentially constraining—trait–trait relationships. academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-...

Larger islands supported more persistent plant–animal mutualistic networks. Happy to have made a tiny contribution to this great study from Thousand Island Lake! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Looking for sci comm opportunities? Join us as a writer for American Naturalist press releases! These write-ups are primarily written by graduate students and other early-career scientists. No experience required; we have editors to help along the way. Apps due Sept 1. Please share widely :D

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... An amazing paper led by Jamie on the feedback between competition and evolution!

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!

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

Happening in an hour!

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!

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

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

Now out in Ecology Letters 🥳

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

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...

🚨 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.

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

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/...

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!

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

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)