Abstract: As crucial components of terrestrial ecosystems, plants provide a critical window for revealing the evolutionary patterns of terrestrial ecosystems through studies of their spatiotemporal distribution on deep-time Earth’s surfaces. By analyzing the response of paleoflora to ecological environmental changes, we can not only elucidate the dynamic evolutionary patterns of regional plant communities but also reconstruct the structure and evolutionary mechanisms of entire terrestrial ecosystems during geological history. The construction of ecological models, based on analyzing how plant traits, habits, and distributions are influenced by ecological factors, demonstrates advantages of high research precision, effective visualization, and user-friendliness, playing a significant role in deep-time paleophytogeographic reconstruction. This study focuses on three representative ecological models: the Biome model, the SEG model, and the Eco-Plant model. By employing plant macrofossils and microfossils from the Changhsingian-Induan interval as case studies, we systematically elucidate the relationship between vegetation ecology and climate evolution through the application of the Eco-Plant model. Finally, addressing current challenges in deep-time paleophytogeographic reconstruction, we propose a multi-source data integration strategy to further advance the application of ecological models in reconstructing ancient plant geographic distributions across geological timescales. 

Key words: paleophytogeography, paleoecology, ecological model, Changhsingian-Induan