Muyang is a 5th year PhD student in the Jetz Lab. Despite the field-work connotation of his name (‘muyang’ means shepherd in Chinese), he was mostly fascinated by the theoretical side of ecology. He is mainly interested in understanding biodiversity patterns across scales, and spent a lot of time on island biogeography theory and meta-community theory. Compared to the daily struggle with messy occurrence-only data and large environmental raster layers, he enjoys more on thinking about the fundamental concepts in ecology and how to better measure them. He has published a paper in the American Naturalist on beta diversity, linking to colonization and extinction rates in the island biogeography theory, and find that the size of species pool has no effect on community similarity. He also developed a computational efficient method to quantify n-dimensional hypervolumes which allows comparing the relative importance of individual niche axis and a dimensionality component. Prior to joining the Jetz Lab, he has worked on estimating the number of unknow species in vascular plant in China and studying the effect of intergroup and intragroup competitions on body mass in Rhesus macaques.