Danyan Leng

I am a first-year PhD student in the Future of Working Landscapes Lab (FoWL) at the University of Colorado Boulder, where I focus on using interdisciplinary and mixed method approaches to understand how wildfires impact biodiversity in human-dominated landscapes

I received a Master of Environmental Management (MEM) from the Yale School of the Environment in 2022. Prior to my studies at Yale, I graduated from the University of Washington in 2018 with double majors in economics and environmental science. My previous research projects span studying wildlife-human coexistence, avian foraging ecology, fisheries and marine conservation policy, and sustainable development in U.S., China, and Africa.

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Research Interests

I believe wildlife conservation is a field of study that seeks interdisciplinary collaboration and needs support from stakeholders that have very different positions and values. I am particularly interested in understanding how to foster sustainable human-nature relationships in areas experiencing intense land-use modification and/or across geo-political boundaries using solution-based approaches.

Some of my current and previous research address the topics include:

Wildfire ecology in wildland urban interface
Large-scale biodiversity conservation
Integrating socioeconomic perspectives into conservation practices
China's policies and subsidization of distant-water fisheries
Public willingness to pay for wolf-livestock coexistence conservation
Foraging ecology of Canada jay in Denali National Park

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Research

Other Projects