Research

Min-Hui Lo Assistant professor / Department of Atmospheric Sciences “How much does groundwater contribute to sea level rise?“ Min-Hui Lo Rising sea level is a threat to people who live near the coastal regions and in small islands; hence, accurately projecting rates of sea level rise is important, especially under climate changes. Recent assessments indicate that groundwater depletion (GWD) may become the most important positive terrestrial contribution. Future projections of increasing reliance on groundwater suggests that GWD will become the most important singular terrestrial contribution to sea level rise over…

Chih-hao Hsieh Professor / Institute of Oceanography   Fishing causes age/size truncation and drives marine fishes to aggregate in space, elevating ecosystem risk   A population usually does not uniformly distribute in space. Previous studies have found that when a population is getting larger, the variance of the population abundance over a space (i.e., aggregation degree) will also be increasing. This mean-variance relationship is the well-known Taylor’s power law (V=aMb). The exponent b in Taylor’s power law is an indicator of the “aggregation potential” of a species. That is, for…

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…