Established in 2007, the Ecological Evolution Group in the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Gardens aims to promote research and conservation science in the Asian tropics. Through a combination of basic research, applied conservation, local outreach, and student training, we hope to have a positive impact on the future condition and management of natural forests and the communities they sustain. We integrate experience across a wide range of scientific approaches and techniques from systematics and phylogenetics to remote sensing and genomic biology.
The conservation and management of tropical forest resources is probably the most complex of the life sciences as it strives to balance the interaction between global human socio-economic patterns and poorly understood ecological and evolutionary forces of megadiverse communities. We are working at this interface in many ways, from using biogeographic modeling and ecological economic anlayses to phylogenetic studies of phenotypic trait evolution using genomic sequencing projects based on the latest cutting-edge DNA sequencing platforms and analytical techniques.
The group has grown rapidly and the scope of our work continues to expand, particularly in the areas of genomics and graduate student training. While the central themes of the work remain the same, our techniques and approaches seem to be as dynamic as the region in which we find ourselves!
Latest Updates
14 May 2012Registration open for special course funded by NSF-USA: Next-gen forest surveys in Tropical Asia
Next-gen forest surveys in Tropical Asia This course will focus on the major issues surrounding tropical Asian forest management and the use of biotic surveys to monitor forest change. The course will consist of two parts: an on-line discussion course in Fall 2012 and a four week field course in July 2013 at the Xishuangbanna [...]
26 Apr 2012Dr. Cannon attends inception workshop on timber tracking
A workshop hosted by Bioversity International, the German Ministry of Forest, Agriculture, and Consumer Protection, and the Forest Research Institute of Malaysia was held April 24-25 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to initiate a project on the “Identification of timber species and origins using DNA and stable isotope fingerprints”. Dr. Cannon has participated in the earliest [...]
17 Apr 2012Exploiting sparseness in de novo genome assembly
Mr. Ye Chengxi, formerly a member of the Ecology and Evolution of Plant-Animal Interactions at XTBG and now a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science and Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland has just published an article in BMC Bioinformatics. The article demonstrates a novel [...]
16 Apr 2012We were hacked but we’re back!!
Thanks to Loren Bell, working from the wilds of Borneo, the Ecological Evolution website should be fully functional again! We’ll run a tighter ship in the future. Cheers!! Official announcement about the new NSF field course to be released soon.
27 Mar 2012Genomic workshop announcement June 4-7, 2012
Workshop on Tropical Biodiversity and Genomics Time and Venue June 4-7 2012 Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden Menglun, Yunnan, China This small workshop will be organized in two sessions: a series of lectures and discussions with all participants, followed by two days of focused analysis of participant data. The Ecological Evolution group at XTBG has whole [...]
