Congratulations!Yunyao Ma successfully defended her doctoral thesis

15 May 2024

Photo: Youssef Saadaoui

We are proud to announce the successful disputation of our SICSS member Yunyao Ma.

Her dissertation “Exploring the community assembly of nonvascular vegetation based on a process-based modeling approach” was supervised by Prof. Dr. Philipp Porada and Prof. Dr. Maaike Y. Bader.

Yunyao investigated the roles of environmental filtering and competition, two fundamental community assembly processes in non-vascular vegetation, using a process-based model called LiBry. She examined the relative importance of various climatic factors on vegetation carbon balance across different climate regions, which is crucial for survival and thus community assembly. Subsequently, she quantified the impact of competition on the functional assembly of non-vascular communities.

Yunyao was a member of Institute of Plant Science and Microbiology (IPM) at Universität Hamburg.

Her future plans?

She will continue her academic career as a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen, where she will be exploring nitrogen fixation in moss-cyanobacteria associations.

Yunyao's published papers are as follows:

Exploring environmental and physiological drivers of the annual carbon budget of biocrusts from various climatic zones with a mechanistic data-driven model, Ma, Yunyao, Weber, B., Kratz, A., Raggio Quílez, J., Colesie, C., Veste, M., Bader, M. Y. & Porada, P., 2023, In: Biogeosciences, 20, 2553–2572

Quantifying the effect of competition on the functional assembly of bryophyte and lichen communities: A process-based model analysis, Ma, Yunyao, Bader, M. Y., Petersen, I. & Porada, P., 2024, In: Journal of Ecology, 112, 998-1012