Wenyuan Zhang

Work

2025.7—present: School of Life Science, Nanjing University. Tenure-track Assistant Professor.

2023.1—2025.6: Department of Biology, McGill University. Postdoc.

Education

2018.9—2022.6: University of Oxford, DPhil

2015.9—2018.7: Tsinghua University, MSc

2010.9—2015.6: University of Science and Technology Beijing, BSc

Welcome to ZIEL (the Zhang Integrative Ecology Lab)—where interests of ecology meets scientific discovery. With zeal and precision, we are a team of curious explorers who study ecosystems to understand and protect the natural world, working towards a sustainable future.

Our work focuses on three interconnected areas:

Biodiversity Science

We explore changes of biodiversity patterns and the underlying mechanisms to provide the evidence base for conservation under global change. This ranges from processes influencing our estimation on biodiveristy dynamics (e.g., sampling and monitoring schemes), to causal infereneces to biodiversity change, expecially when multiple factors are involved to the change.

Movement Ecology and Connectivity Conservation

We track animal movements using satellite tracking technology and lab environments of springtail (Collembola) to understand their movement journeys and investigate how to translate movement behaviours into long-term population persistence. This allows for incorporating more movement behaviours into connectivity conservation and providing more effective and efficient conservation strategies.

Human-nature interactions

We model different interactions between people and nature from the perspective of personalised ecology, i.e., the investigation of the direct interactions between individual people and nature and their ecological dimensions. We are interested comprehending in how human cultures can influence our unique and personalised interactions with nature and how those interactions can influence our understanding of nature and conservation outcomes in return.

Please visit our lab website (wenyuanzhang.com) for research details and opportunities to join us!