Research

Min-Hui Lo Assistant professor / Department of Atmospheric Sciences "A decade of sea level rise slowed by climate-driven hydrology“ J. T. Reager, A. S. Gardner, J. S. Famiglietti, D. N. Wiese, A. Eicker, M.-H. Lo. While the ice sheets and mountain glaciers continue melting, changes in climate over the past decade have led to Earth’s continents to store an extra 3.2 trillion tons of water in land (over soils, lakes and underground aquifers), temporarily lowering the rate of sea level rise by about 20% that is called “climate-driven sea level…

Chih-hao Hsieh Professor / Institute of Oceanography Synergistic effects of predator and prey size diversity on trophic transfer efficiency in ocean ecosystems   Carmen García-Comas and Chih-hao Hsieh Institute of Oceanography, National Taiwan University   A group of scientists from the Institute of Oceanography, National Taiwan University, led by Dr. Carmen García-Comas and Prof. Chih-hao Hsieh, demonstrate that the interaction of predator and prey size diversities affects trophic transfer efficiency in marine plankton. This is the first study to analyze individual size structure at two trophic levels in plankton, and…

Chuan-Chou Shen Professor / Department of Geosciences Dynamics of tropical rainfall belt in the western Pacific over the past 282 thousand years The Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), the most important realm for global ecosystem and human population, encompasses the heaviest tropical seasonal rain belt on Earth. Due to its intensive rainfall gradient, a small displacement can cause dramatic changes in hydroclimate. Being the corresponding author, Dr. Chuan-Chou Shen, a Distinguished Professor of the Department of Geosciences, and his team published their newest research results in the internationally renowned journal “Nature…

Chih-hao Hsieh Associate Professor / Institute of Oceanography Scientists of National Taiwan University develop a new ecological theory to use individual size distribution as biological indicators for foodweb complexity “The big eat the small” is one of the most well-known ecological principles in aquatic ecosystems. Following this principle, together with energy loss during trophic transfer, a famous trophic pyramid is established; that is, the abundance of small organisms (e.g. small fishes) should be higher than that of large ones (e.g. large fishes). More specifically, the individual abundances decrease gradually as…

Takeshi Miki Associate Professor / Institute of Oceanography Linking Genome and Biodiversity to Ecosystem Associate Professor, Takeshi Miki from Institute of Oceanography with an international team proposed a novel approach to assess the functional redundancy of ecosystem and the importance of biodiversity. This proposed novel approach, linking whole genomic information of diverse microbes into complexity and multidimensionality of ecosystem functioning, can give an index to assess functional redundancy of ecosystem. The collaborators in Japan (Prof. Taichi Yokokawa in Ehime University and Prof. Kazuaki Matsui in Kinki University) leaded the microcosm…

Jeng-Da Chai Associate Professor / Department of Physics Tackling the Long-Standing Energy Gap Problem in Kohn-Sham Density Functional Theory Over the past two decades, Kohn-Sham density functional theory (KS-DFT) has been one of the most popular theoretical methods for the study of the ground-state properties of large electronic systems. Although the essential ingredient of KS-DFT, the exact exchange-correlation (XC) energy functional Exc[r], has not been known, functionals based on the local density approximation (LDA) and generalized gradient approximations (GGAs), are reasonably accurate for properties governed by short-range XC effects, and…

Chih-hao Hsieh Associate Professor / Institute of Oceanography Effects of size diversity on trophic interactions in ocean ecosystems Lin Ye and Chih-hao Hsieh Institute of Oceanography, National Taiwan University With the aid of new technologies to measure zooplankton size and community structure, a group of scientists of National Taiwan University formulated a novel hypothesis: increasing predator size diversity enhances the strength of top-down control on prey through diet niche partitioning, and this hypothesis was supported by empirical plankton data in the East China Sea. This work is led by the…

Chih-hao Hsieh Associate Professor / Institute of Oceanography Associate Professor, Chih-hao Hsieh, from the Institute of Oceanography/Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, together with an international research team develops a method that helps examine nonlinear climate impacts on Pacific sardines.  This study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (4/17/2013), provides a new solution to forecast how fishing, climate changes, and ecosystem condition can work in concert to affect the abundance of fish stock. In the early 1940s, California fishermen caught a great amount of sardine at a…