Meet PhD candidate Jerry Chen

Jerry Chen started last January as a PhD student at the Centre for Complex Systems Studies. He will study the vegetation ecosystem resilience to flooding and drought induced by climate change, under the supervision of Kirsten ten Tusscher, Hugo de Boer and Stefan Dekker. Below he briefly introduces himself.

From the Pearl River Delta to the North Sea

Growing up on the southern coast of China, I completed my Bachelor’s in Environmental Science at a local university. I studied mangroves for my Bachelor’s thesis, during which my supervisor was involved in a cooperation with a professor from Utrecht University. That was when I got to know Utrecht University and considered pursuing a Master’s programme in the Netherlands. I enrolled in the Master’s programme Sustainable Development, where I first came across the concept of complex systems.

Complexity in natural ecosystems

I studied cold-water coral reefs at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) for my Master’s thesis. As I focused on the spatial distribution of cold-water coral faunal community, my work did not directly involve complex system studies. However, the emergence of carbonate mounds which are formed by coral reefs and on which corals are thriving, is hypothesized to result from complex systems behaviour. I became fascinated by the fact that the framework of complex systems is everywhere in natural ecosystems, as it can account for the formation of arid ecosystems, mussel beds, cold-water coral reefs, etc. That is why I decided to get a feeling of its ‘magic’ for my PhD study.

Biological and ecological processes at multiple scales

My research at the Center of Complex System Studies focuses on the vegetation ecosystem resilience to flooding and drought induced by climate change. I attempt to incorporate biological and ecological processes at different spatio-temporal scales—from the development of individual plant plasticity in the short term to the emergence of ecosystem spatial patterns based on plant-plant interactions and plant-environment interactions in the long term.

Individual plants are expected to respond differently to water stress conditions from drought to submergence, leading to various phenotypic plasticity and subsequently multiple stable states of ecosystem spatial patterns and community composition. These emerging ecosystems, conversely, are expected to play a key role in the water cycle, as plants transpire about 97% to 99.5% of the water taken from soil and global transpiration accounts for approximately 10% of the atmospheric moisture. By developing ecohydrological models that integrate these processes, I aim to explain how they impose feedbacks on one another and together shape the ecosystem resilience to water stress conditions ranging from drought to flooding. I hope my results can shed light on the nature conservation initiatives in terms of the plant species and their relative abundances that may likely improve ecosystem resilience.