Wenyuan Zhang | 张文远

My research interests are understanding how biodiversity is changing across the planet and factors that may influence our understanding on such processes. I am now working with Professor Andrew Gonzalez and Dr Laura Pollock as a postdoc on biodiversity spatial planning in Canada.

Before that, I did my DPhil in the Department of Biology of the University of Oxford on biodiversity estimation and their implications, supervised by Professor Ben Sheldon, Professor Richard Grenyer and Professor Kevin Gaston.

I also have insterests in migration ecology and did my MSc on species distribution of migratory birds with Dr Yali Si in the Department of Earth System Science of Tsinghua University. My undergraduate study was at the University of Science and Technology Beijing.

Selected publications

Divers. Distrib.

Challenging the geographic bias in recognising large-scale patterns of diversity change [Cover]

Wenyuan Zhang*, Richard Grenyer, Kevin J. Gaston, and Ben C. Sheldon

Diversity and Distributions, 2023

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Aim:Geographic structure is a fundamental organising principle in ecological and Earth sciences, and our planet is conceptually divided into distinct geographic clusters (e.g. ecoregions and biomes) demarcating unique diversity patterns. Given recent advances in technology and data availability, however, we ask whether geographically clustering diversity time-series should be the default framework to identify meaningful patterns of diversity change.
Location:North America.
Taxon: Aves.
Methods: We first propose a framework that recognises patterns of diversity change based on similarities in the behaviour of diversity time-series, independent of their specific or relative spatial locations. Specifically, we applied an artificial neural network approach, the self-organising map (SOM), to group time-series of over 0.9 million observations from the North American Breeding Birds Survey (BBS) data from 1973 to 2016. We then test whether time-series identified as having similar behaviour are geographically structured.
Results: We find little evidence of strong geographic structure in patterns of diversity change for North American breeding birds. The majority of the recognised diversity time-series patterns tend to be indistinguishable from being independently distributed in space.
Main Conclusions: Our results suggest that geographic proximity may not correspond to shared temporal trends in diversity; assuming that geographic clustering is the basis for analysis may bias diversity trend estimation. We suggest that approaches that consider variability independently of geographic structure can serve as a useful addition to existing organising rules of biodiversity time-series.
One Earth

Prioritising global conservation of migratory birds over their migration network

Wenyuan Zhang*, Jie Wei, and Yanjie Xu

One Earth, 2023

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Halting and reversing biodiversity loss is a grand challenge in the Anthropocene, which suggests an urgent need to effectively protect key areas that support species sustainability. However, large knowledge gaps exist in determining those key areas for migratory species and the extent to which they are protected, albeit with the essential and indispensable functions that migratory species perform in biodiversity conservation. Here, we used over 390 million community-contributed bird observations to derive order-specific, spatially explicit estimates of annual migration networks for 26 bird orders across the world. We found that 35% of the overall 343 important sites that strongly connect the migration network across the annual cycle of global migratory birds are uncovered by protected areas. This leads to nearly 87% of 1,862 migratory bird species being at risk. Migratory species benefit more from considering various levels of site importance to safeguard network integrity, with conservation efforts across countries.
Curr. Biol.

Habitat change and biased sampling influence estimation of diversity trends

Wenyuan Zhang*, Ben C. Sheldon, Richard Grenyer, and Kevin J. Gaston

Current Biology, 2021

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Recent studies have drawn contrasting conclusions about the extent to which local-scale measures of biodiversity are declining, and whether such patterns conflict with the global-scale declines that have attracted much attention. A key source of high quality data for such analyses comes from longitudinal biodiversity studies which sample a given taxon repeatedly over time at a specific location. There has been relatively little consideration of how habitat change might lead to biases in the sampling and continuity of biodiversity time-series data, and the consequent potential for bias in the biodiversity trends that result. Here, based on analysis of standardised routes from the North American Breeding Bird Survey (3014 routes sampled over 18 years), we demonstrate that major local habitat change is associated with an increase in the rate of survey cessations. We further show that routes that were continued despite major habitat changes show reduced diversity. By simulating potential rates of loss, we show that the underlying real trends in taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity can even reverse in sign if more than a quarter of diversity is lost from routes that ceased, and are thus no longer included in surveys. Our analyses imply that biodiversity loss can be underestimated by biases introduced if continued sampling in longitudinal studies is influenced by local change. We argue that researchers and conservation practitioners should be aware of the potential for bias in such data and seek to use more robust methods to evaluate biodiversity trends and make conservation decisions.