On August 16, 2019, at the invitation of the Natural Forest Ecology Group of the Institute of Applied Ecology (IAE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Associate Professor LIU Xubing from the School of Life Sciences of Sun Yat-Sen University visited IAE and gave a talk entitled “Resource partitioning and species coexistence among arbuscular and ectomycorrhizal trees”. Prof. LIU gave a detailed explanation of the relationship between plant-soil feedback system and plant diversity maintenance mechanism in forests, including how mycorrhizal fungi affect the ability of plants to absorb inorganic and organic phosphorus and how different mycorrhizal types affect plant-soil feedback system. The talk had strong repercussions. More than 20 people including researchers WANG Xugao, WANG Peng and YANG Kai attended the academic activity. After the talk, researchers of the Natural Forest Ecology Group and Prof. LIU Xubing conducted in-depth and detailed discussions on the collaborative research in the near future.

LIU Xubing is currently an Associate Professor at the School of Life Sciences of Sun Yat-sen University, doctoral advisor and winner of the National Outstanding Youth Fund. He also won the Doctoral Academic Rookie Award of the Ministry of Education, the Rookie Award for Nature Conservation from the International Biodiversity Program - China Committee, and the Outstanding Young Teacher Award of Wen Fund. He is mainly engaged in the study of species coexistence and biodiversity in forest biota communities. He recently works on the interaction between host plants and soil microbes and tries to uncover the mechanisms of community assembly and diversity maintenance in subtropical evergreen broad-leaved forest ecosystems in South Asia. He, as the first author or correspondent author, has published a number of high-IF papers, including one paper in Science Advances, three in Ecology Letters, and two in Ecology. These papers have been widely cited by comprehensive journals such as Science, Nature, PNAS, and other mainstream journals including Ecology Letters, Ecology, ISME Journal, Journal of Ecology, New Phytologist, etc. His average cites per paper is over 160 and some of his papers have been identified as ESI Highly Cited Papers.