Dan Flynn, as a postdoctoral Research Scientist, works in the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland from 2011.

In the past few years, Dan Flynn doctor visited China many times for academic exchange, and he conducted the research about the grassland biodiversity in the Inner Mongolia Grassland Ecosystem Research Station, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Recently, Dan Flynn mainly focused on the Biodiversity-Ecosystem-Function relationships (BEF), that is, the biodiversity of grassland ecosystem including species diversity, functional diversity and phylogenetic diversity, and examined the relationship between biodiversity and community assembly in order to explore the effects of the biodiversity on grassland ecosystem function.

From March 11 to 13, 2012, Dan Flynn was invited by the professor He Jin-sheng and visited the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences for academic exchange.

In afternoon on 13th March, Dan Flynn presented a wonderful report with the title “Measuring biodiversity to decipher community assembly and community disassembly”. His report mainly focuses on the three key questions following the below: 1) Based on the niche theory, how dose environmental filtering such as grazing influence the assembly of grassland community, and consequently the grassland ecosystem function? 2) How do phylogenetic diversity and function trait variation control biodiversity effects on biomass production, and which phylogenetic diversity or functional diversity much better predict the biodiversity effects on ecosystem functioning (Dan F. B. Flynn et al. Ecology, 92(8), 2011, 1573-1581)? 3) Under the control conditions, how do the competitions among plants with different function type affect the plant macroevolution）, and consequently the ecosystem diversity and functioning. These questions were very important for us to improve understanding of the consequences of biodiversity loss. Finally, Dan Flynn discussed warmly with the students about the important ecological questions as such “how to determine the niche overlapping”,“the ecological implication of phylogenetic diversity” and “how to construct phylogenetic tree at community level”.