Jian Yang received his B.Sc. in geography from Shaanxi Normal University in 1997, his M.Sc. in ecology from the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Science in 2000, and his Ph.D. in forestry from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2005. Currently, he is an associate professor of forest landscape ecology at the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, University of Kentucky, USA. His research mainly involves broad-scale environmental and ecological questions that are closely related to forest landscape ecology, ecosystem modeling, wildland fire science, and climate change. He is particularly interested in understanding the role of disturbance and spatial structure on the flow of nutrients and energy and the movement of species within and among diverse ecosystems on a landscape. Ultimately, his research focus is to seek the fundamental relationships among forest, climate, and disturbance across different scales.