Research Summary

I investigate the ecological mechanisms that shape biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and stability across spatial and temporal scales. My work integrates long-term experiments, field-based studies, and data synthesis to understand how global change drivers—such as climate change, grazing, habitat loss, nutrient enrichment, fire, and agricultural abandonment—affect plant functional traits, population dynamics, community assembly, carbon cycling, and other key ecosystem functions.

Currently, I'm one of five co-PIs of the Cedar Creek Long-Term Ecological Research site (LTER-CDR; NSF #2425352). I've conducted research across a wide range of ecosystems, including Mongolian grasslands and deserts, Arizona rangelands, Midwestern old fields and prairies, oak savannas, and temperate forests. My recent work also extends beyond these terrestrial systems to include cross-system comparisons between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, such as kelp forests and fish communities, and to uncover general principles of ecosystem dynamics under global change.

Focus Areas

Diversity–Stability Relationships Across Scales​

My recent work unifies the spatial scaling laws of biodiversity and ecosystem stability. Using extensive datasets from NEON (plant communities across the U.S.) and RivFishTIME (global freshwater fish communities), we test the theory that spatial insurance—the stabilizing role of beta diversity—supports large-scale ecosystem stability (Liang et al. 2022 Nat. Ecol. Evol.). We also propose the concept of stability debt, where biodiversity loss leads to delayed instability following habitat degradation (Liang et al. 2025 Science). This work enables us to assess the generality of diversity–stability relationships across ecosystems and environmental gradients, revealing when and where biodiversity is most critical for maintaining resilience under global change.

• We are now expanding this research to examine how spatial insurance and stability debt are shaped by global change drivers such as fire, nutrient enrichment, successional dynamics, and grazing (Liang et al. 2021, 2025 Ecol. Lett.; Zuo et al. 2023 JAE) across a range of experiments.

Grassland Restoration and Carbon Management

I study how land management interventions—such as prescribed fire, grazing, and native seeding—interact with climate variability to shape biodiversity, plant community dynamics, and carbon cycling in grasslands. This includes examining how rainfall variability and extreme drought influence the ecological outcomes of restoration and management (Liang et al. 2016, 2018, 2019a, 2021a-b; Wu et al. 2022 Ecol. Evol.). 

• We are currently investigating how prescribed fire, combined with restoration strategies like native seeding, alters plant functional composition and promotes long-term soil carbon storage in oldfields.

Plant Functional Traits in Grazed and Arid Ecosystems

​I investigate how plant functional traits mediate species responses to grazing pressure and environmental stress in arid and semi-arid ecosystems. My research explores how traits related to resource use, growth form, and phenology influence plant survival, community assembly, and ecosystem function under herbivory and climatic extremes. In desert and rangeland systems, I examine how trait-based strategies enable plants to persist under water limitation and grazing, providing insight into vegetation resilience and ecosystem adaptation under global change (Liang et al. 2018, 2019b-c; Wang et al. Ecol. Appl.).