News
12-01-2024
Congratulations to Shijun for this new publication: Carbon-negative transition by utilizing overlooked carbon in waste landfills. In this paper, we explore an often-overlooked aspect of the global carbon cycle: carbon stored in modern city landfills. Landfills contribute to roughly one-tenth of global methane emissions, yet their standing carbon stock remains poorly characterized. In 346 Chinese cities alone, we estimate the landfill standing stock to be 0.5 Gigaton—equivalent to the weight of 50,000 Eiffel Towers or half the weight of all built structures in New York City, and about 1/20 of annual human carbon emissions. Studying different forms of urban waste can open new doors toward carbon neutrality. I would argue that this research positions waste study as a novel frontier in global biogeochemistry.
11-18-2024
Welcome to Steve to officially join our lab group.
10-01-2024
Congratulations to Aiyu for her ESA Bulletin piece that unveils the mysteries of bamboo: the grass that rises to forest dominance. For a more detailed treatise of this topic, check out this fantastic paper in Ecological Monographs: The enigmatic life history of the bamboo explained as a strategy to arrest succession.
Press 01-18-2024
In this news piece “the new science of waste”, Chris and I discuss the importance of not overlooking the by-product of our productive economy. Taking a complex systems approach, we treat these by-product as metabolic waste from urban systems and apply scaling theory to this unpleasant side of our society. We reveal amazing regularities that spans hundreds to thousands of cities worldwide. Examining how cities generate waste is only the first step, we human society eventually needs to figure out a way to close the material loop. Natural ecosystems and the organisms within, being it the early multi-cellular life or the ancient wood-decaying fungi, have figured out how to deal with nature’s “waste” for multi-million years, we can too! Check out our paper here.
Other news outlets that covered our work: Phys.org, ScienMag, Wissenschaft.de, Techzle, WasteManagementReview, InsideWasteWeekly, Envirotec
“City-Earth-Spiral” by Elisa Heinrich Mora, with inputs from Katie Mast, Abha Eli and Mingzhen Lu. It conveys the meaning of expanding cities and their central impacts on all facets of life on earth. The spirals inspiration came from nautilus curve, which closely relates to scaling.
01-17-2024
Our recent paper on understanding the scaling laws of waste generation across cities worldwide is now available online in the new journal Nature Cities. Congratulations to the team!
01-01-2024
Congratulations to Yue Zhang for her recent publication appearing on the cover of Trends in Ecology & Evolution. The paper itself can be found here. For earlier exploration of this topic, check out this paper.
01-01-2024
Welcome Bohan Yin to join our lab group as a student research assistant. Bohan is a sophomore student at NYU majoring in Data Science and Computer Science, his current research in the lab aims to elucidate the global distribution of human built environment.
10-04-2023
Congratulations to Jingkang Liao for his first publication, accessible from Landscape Ecology website: https://rdcu.be/dnKZ3. This paper explores the current geographical distribution of ants on Tibetan Plateau and investigate future regimes using a combination of longterm manipulation experiments and statistical modeling (MaxEnt).
10-01-2023
Welcome Shloka Janapaty to join our lab group as an assistant research scientist! Shloka is a fourth-year undergraduate at Columbia University studying Applied Mathematics. She is interested in ecosystem ecology, biogeochemistry, and sustainability-related quests such as understanding the science of waste. In February 2023, Shloka received a patent for her experimental work on low-density polyethylene degradation in landfills. She is also a Straubel Research Fellow and United Nations Millennium Fellow.
09-28-2023
Congrats to Yue Zhang for her publication investigating the origin of bi-dimensionality in plant root traits, now available in Trends in Ecology and Evolution through https://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169-5347(23)00233-1.
09-01-2023
Mingzhen joined New York University’s Department of Environmental Studies as an assistant professor.
08-08-2023
Together with Dr. Shersingh Joseph Tumber-Dávila, I am hosting an Organized Oral Session for ESA 2023 (Portland, Oregon), titled “A System Understanding of Plant Roots and Their Global Consequences”. Join us in person or online, we have a stellar group featuring speakers around the world (Alphabetic order): Avni Malhotra, Edmund February, Jesse Nippert, Katherine Sinacore, Nathaly Guerrero-Ramirez, Rob Jackson.
Media and Press Coverage
Podcast interview:
Michael Garfield (2022), “The evolution of root systems & biogeochemical cycling”
Press story:
Aaron Sidder (2024), “The new science of waste”
Jake Buehler (2022), “Africa’s fynbos plants hold their ground with the world’s thinnest roots”
Helen Swingler (2022), “Fynbos puts the squeeze on trees via the thinnest roots known”
Liz Fuller-Wright (2022), “World’s thinnest roots are ‘underground weapons’ in ecological competition”
Aaron Sidder (2022), “What lies beneath: Roots as drivers of South African landscape pattern”
Morgan Kelly (2019), “Local plant-microbe alliances shape global biomes”
Morgan Kelly (2018), “Theory suggests root efficiency, independence drove global spread of flora.”