From June 26th to July 1st, invited by Dr. DING Jianqing from Invasion Ecology and Biocontrol Lab, WBG, Professor Richard N. Mack from Washington State University taught courses on community ecology in WBG. The training was mainly open to graduate students and young teachers in Wuhan and was totally free. More than 30 people from Wuhan Botanical Garden, Institute of Hydrobiology, CAS and Hubei University participated.

These courses included the basic conception and main research method of community ecology as well as the frontier of current research. The students had deep discussions with Prof. Mack from different respects and benefited a lot. Prof. Mack delivered the training certificate to each student after the whole training was finished and made a presentation entitled “Invasive Plants as Catalysts for the Spread of Human Parasites” on July 1st.

As a professor in Washington State University, Prof. Mack has been working on community ecology both for teaching and research for many years and he is a well-known expert in invasive ecology as well. He was once a member of the editorial board in many famous international journals such as Ecological Monograph, Ecology, Ecological Applications, New Phytologist, Oecologia and Biological Invasions, etc. He has published more than 100 papers in journals like Science, Ecology, etc. Among these papers, the article entitled “Biotic invasions: causes, epidemiology, global consequences and control” has been cited 1535 times until now. After becoming international guest professor of WBG in 2010, Professor Richard N. Mack came to WBG every year to have academic exchange with researchers and instruct students on the experiments.

 Professor Richard N. Mack delivering lecture (Image by WANG Yi)