Xiao Feng
· Assistant ProfessorUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill · Biology
Active 1999–2026
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About
Xiao Feng is an Assistant Professor at the UNC Department of Biology. He is a quantitative ecologist and biogeographer, with research interests focused on macroecological patterns such as biogeography and biodiversity, as well as emerging environmental issues under global change. His research primarily utilizes statistical models and computational informatics to address ecological and biogeographic questions across broad spatial scales. The goal of his work is to provide a scientific basis for biodiversity conservation and land management in the context of global change.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Ecology
- Biology
- Environmental science
- Data science
- World Wide Web
- Geography
- Environmental resource management
- Agroforestry
- Database
Selected publications
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-08-12 · 10 citations
articleOpen accessSenior authorAlpine treeline is a prominent biogeographic feature worldwide, determined by the physiological limit of tree life form. There are considerable variations in the various dimensions of physiological limit among tree taxa; thus, varied environmental drivers and spatial patterns are expected for different tree taxa at treelines. However, such taxonomic variability of treeline is often overlooked in large-scale studies. Here, we assembled, to our knowledge, the most comprehensive dataset of tree spe…
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-11-11 · 6 citations
articleOpen accessA longstanding question in ecology asks whether or not species that achieve large geographic ranges also have large climatic niche breadths. Using a dataset of ~250,000 terrestrial plant species spanning diverse clades (bryophytes, ferns, gymnosperms, and flowering plants), we demonstrate a consistent positive relationship between geographic range size and climatic niche breadth across latitudinal and elevational gradients. This relationship holds across major phylogenetic groups, suggesting a g…
BioScience · 2025-06-24 · 5 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Developing a predictive science of the biosphere depends heavily on the rapidly expanding biodiversity data that are commonly stored in biodiversity databases. Despite the proliferation of biodiversity databases, their independent operation has limited data discovery, comparison, and synthesis. Therefore, the biodiversity informatics community has called for improved alignment among these efforts to better catalog Earth's biodiversity. The primary challenges are incomplete knowledge of…
Using large language models to address the bottleneck of georeferencing natural history collections
Nature Plants · 2025-12-05 · 1 citations
articleSenior authorDRYAD · 2026-05-03
datasetOpen accessAim: Biotic interactions, such as pollination, seed dispersal, and parasitism, are key for biodiversity and ecosystem function. Ecological networks quantify the structure of biotic interactions providing a framework to evaluate their spatial dynamics under global change. While climate and human influence are important predictors of network structure, we hypothesize that the effects rely on the interaction type and the organisms involved. It remains unknown whether different types of ecological n…
Frequent coauthors
- 63 shared
Monica Papeş
National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis
- 59 shared
Huijie Qiao
- 54 shared
A. Townsend Peterson
University of Kansas
- 50 shared
Gengping Zhu
- 50 shared
Luis E. Escobar
Virginia Tech
- 49 shared
Jorge Soberón
University of Kansas
- 42 shared
Brian J. Enquist
Santa Fe Institute
- 31 shared
Daniel Park
Purdue University West Lafayette
Labs
Not provided
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