I am a vegetation ecologist and Associate Professor at National Taiwan University in Taiwan. My homepage with my CV, publication list, teaching and other stuff is here; welcome to visit if interested.

Here are a few questions that fascinate me right now. What causes diversity patterns in plant communities along gradients like elevation, cloud frequency and wind intensity? What is the relative importance of primary ecological processes, like ecological drift, dispersal or selection, in maintaining species coexistence in real plant communities? How useful is the trait-based approach in vegetation ecology? Why do we feel that we should apply more and more complicated analyses to answer more and more trivial questions?

After 2005, I spent each year at least two months in Taiwan doing fieldwork or travelling, and since 2015 I have been teaching at National Taiwan University in Taipei. Before my current job, I was a scientific researcher at Masaryk University in Brno, in the Vegetation Science Group led by Milan Chytrý, and before that, I studied for my academic degrees at the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice, Czech Republic. I was trained as a vegetation ecologist in a temperate region, and now I pursue my research in a subtropical one. This brings me everyday fascination, inspiration and material for my thoughts. More than two decades ago, I fell in love with R, and I still haven’t gotten rid of it. I spent quite a few years analyzing community ecology data and learning new methods of doing so. This led me to find that I prefer simple and more straightforward analyses to those complex ones and even doubt whether those complicated analyses really say what we think they do. I found passion in teaching, which helps me sort the knowledge for myself so that I can pass it to others, forces me to comb the mountains of information to make it digestible and straightforward, and could be great fun (well, sometimes).

This blog is an irregular depository of my mind snapshots: things I am working on, reading about, thinking about or teaching in my classes. It is a way of sorting my mind with an option to discuss with those interested or facing the same questions and problems. I am not sure if anyone is reading this, but if yes, I will be happy to hear your feedback!