Quantitative and Functional Ecology
Apa khabar! I’m Lai Hao Ran (賴浩然) and a plant community ecologist, currently jointly appointed by South East Asia Rainforest Research Partnership (SEARRP), Malaysia and Imperial College London, UK. My research aims to understand and generalise the dynamics of forest biodiversity through functional traits, statistical rigour, and long-term monitoring. My career goal is to build capacity and foster a more innovative research community in Malaysia and tropical Asia.
Please feel free to reach out for research collaboration, forest fieldwork, guest teaching, and project (co)supervision.
Research themes
With selected publications.
Functional trait ecology
Plant functional traits are a universal currency for understanding how species respond to their environment and shape the communities around them. My work uses traits to explain forest community assembly, successional dynamics, and biodiversity patterns across tropical and subtropical systems — from Borneo to New Zealand.
Lai et al. (2020) Functional traits that moderate tropical tree recruitment during post‐windstorm secondary succession Journal of Ecology
Lai et al. (2021) Successional syndromes of saplings in tropical secondary forests emerge from environment‐dependent trait–demography relationships Ecology Letters
Radford‐Smith et al. (2024) A Functional Basis for the Assembly of Australian Subtropical Rainforest Tree Communities Ecology Letters
Species interactions and coexistence
Species do not exist in isolation: competitive, facilitative, and non-additive biotic interactions jointly determine who persists and where. I develop and apply frameworks from modern coexistence theory and ecological network science to quantify these interactions and understand how they propagate through communities under disturbance.
Lai et al. (2021) Non‐additive biotic interactions improve predictions of tropical tree growth and impact community size structure Ecology
Martins et al. (2024) The propagation of disturbances in ecological networks Trends in Ecology & Evolution
Lai et al. (2024) Detecting Nonadditive Biotic Interactions and Assessing Their Biological Relevance among Temperate Rainforest Trees The American Naturalist
Quantitative methods
Ecological inference is only as good as the models behind it. I develop and apply novel statistical approaches —- including hierarchical models, model-based ordination, and joint species distribution models —- to extract rigorous ecological signal from observational and long-term monitoring data.
Lai (2025) Model‐based ordination for phenological studies: From controlling sampling bias to inferring temporal associations Methods in Ecology and Evolution
Dehling et al. (2025) Eltonian Niche Modelling: Applying Joint Hierarchical Niche Models to Ecological Networks Ecology Letters