Background
Jingjing Liang is Assistant Professor of Forest Ecology at
West Virginia University. He is Coordinator of the
Global Forest Biodiversity Initiative (GFBI), an international, multi-stakeholder team of foresters and forest scientists supporting cutting-edge research and policy making in forest sciences and related areas.
Jingjing is also the lead author of GFBI's first major scientific paper: Positive biodiversity-productivity relationship predominant in global forests
\cite{Liang_2016}. The paper, which was written collaboratively in Authorea by a team of over eighty researchers, was published in the the
Oct. 14, 2016 issue of
Science.
Interview
Authorea: Congratulations on publishing in Science! How long has this paper been in the works?
Jingjing Liang: We started the data compilation and analysis in October 2015, and completed the first draft in May, 2016. That being said, our data collection work started a few years ago.
Authorea: Your team analyzed a forest inventory of more than 777,000 sample plots in 44 countries containing more than 30 million trees, making this one of the first attempts to gain a global perspective on the effect of biodiversity on ecosystem productivity. Can you contextualize this accomplishment for us?
Jingjing Liang: Sure, forest inventory data are among the most expensive data to collect on this planet, because 1) it takes skilled and experienced foresters to do the work, and 2) the transportation and related logistics to and from the sites make an inventory trip very costly. According to my rough estimate, measuring 100 plots in remote areas cost $50,000 per year, so, the measurement of all the GFBI plots alone would cost US$400,000,000. GFBI plot data consist one of the largest ground-sourced data set in the world, and would be valuable in many applications from policy making to research support.
Authorea: You argue that the worldwide productivity of forests decreases at an accelerating rate with the loss of biodiversity -- does this mean essentially that it's less costly to preserve biodiversity than it is not to?
Jingjing Liang: Yes, also because we have shown in the article that conserving biodiversity can lead to potential forestry dividends that would far exceed the annual cost of effective biodiversity conservation worldwide.
Authorea: What do you see for the future of biodiversity-productivity relationship (BPR) analyses?
Jingjing Liang: BPR analyses would thrive in two fronts- big data and controlled experiments. The big data approach addresses the observed patterns in natural ecosystems, whereas the experiments addresses the mechanisms behind the foregoing patterns.
Authorea: Your paper contained 84 authors in total. How did you coordinate the writing and work with such a large group? Were there advantages and disadvantages to such a collaboration that you faced?
Jingjing Liang: It is very challenging and takes lots of patience and respect to others. It is difficult to please everyone, or anyone in that matter, but science takes collaboration, and collaboration takes mutual respect, compromise, and even sacrifice.
Authorea: Was there a key reason why you decided to write your article on Authorea? What were some of the features you liked?
Jingjing Liang: We needed a platform that facilitates manuscript development by a large group. Authorea proves to be the platform that we need. It is easy to register and easy to use. The only thing I would recommend is to set the default of "email each comment to everyone" option to "email none", for a large-group collaboration.