Research

This is an overview of my research experiences in various fields and systems that shaped my future academic goal to continue my study in graduate school. For more information, my CV is available here.

Biodiversity and Wildlife Conservation

A significant part of my research is in ecology and conservation science. During my undergraduate study, I participated in fieldwork and projects to learn and practice a variety of wildlife research techniques, including camera trapping, mark-recapture, population surveys, bird banding, and habitat assessment. To better understand how to analyze the field data collected, I also received additional training in the application of quantitative tools to terrestrial and aquatic ecology.

While pursuing my master’s degree at Yale, I was interested in using data-driven and solution-based approaches to promote international collaborations on wildlife conservation. I was excited to deepen my research skills through advanced courses that use R, Python, ArcGIS, and other tools to generate models and maps for species distribution, wildlife movement, landscape connectivity, and remote sensing data. Through this learning process, I also had the opportunity to learn from and collaborate with conservation practitioners and stakeholders to develop actionable conservation plans.

After graduating in 2022, I had two years postgraduate training at the Jetz Lab of Yale Biodiversity and Global Change Center. With a team of experts in conservation biology, engineering, and data science, I am building my capacity of applying interdisciplinary research to large-scale conservation.

In Fall 2024, I started my PhD journey in the Geography Department at the University of Colorado Boulder. I am currently working with Dr. Katherine Siegel on using mixed methods to integrate wildfire management and biodiversity conservation in the wildland–urban interface.

Check examples of my projects here

Integrating Socioeconomic Perspectives to Conservation

During my undergraduate and graduate studies, I am interested in developing interdisciplinary methods to understand how different values, cultures, and power structures shapes the relationship between human and nature and how to integrate these socioeconomic perspectives into wildlife conservation.

In 2018, the national administration of China adopted Ecological Civilization (Eco-civilization) as a new national strategy to realize the country’s sustainability goals. Compared with China’s previous framework on sustainable development, this new strategy takes a more comprehensive and holistic approach to the nation's conservation system. During my time at COI, Dr. Tabitha Mallory and I researched how socioeconomic, cultural, and ecological factors can affect the governments to implement policies relevant to marine Eco-civilization differently in three coastal provinces (Zhejiang, Hainan, and Guangxi) of China. Our preliminary research suggests that ocean culture and the traditional knowledge of local communities could play an essential role in promoting community-based management and collaborative governance for marine conservation under the new national strategy.

Built on my previous work and research experiences, some of my most recent work at Yale include:

Evaluated the opportunities and challenges of ecolabelling and ecotourism for conservation management and science communication
Case-study analysis on integrating traditional and local knowledge into sustainable development in Africa
Understanding the importance of indigenous and community lands for global area-based biodiversity conservation

Check examples of my projects here

Purvis et al. 2019

Mallory et al. 2021

China's Policies and Subsidization of Distant-water Fisheries

Fisheries subsidies are a form of economic support given by the government to promote economic activity and food supply. However, such subsidies can also encourage unsustainable fishing practices by incentivizing the harvest that is no longer profitable without government support. At the 12th Ministerial Conferences on June 2022, member countries of the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreed on eliminating subsidies that contribute to unsustainable and IUU fishing.

As the world’s largest fishing nation and a significant subsidizer of its fishing industry, China plays a critical role in the WTO negotiations on fisheries subsidies. To evaluate the effectiveness of the policies that China initiated to increase sustainable fisheries in the WTO negotiations at the beginning of the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020), my team and I at COI examined the implementation and enforcement of reducing harmful fisheries subsidies from central and provincial levels by synthesizing policy documents and statistical data. Our research find that the fisheries subsidies from the central government declined in the past few years, but harmful subsidies now flow disproportionately from domestic to the distant-water fishing industry and have decreasing transparency in the public database, which can result in greater pressure for international marine conservation.

Link to full report

van Eeden et al. 2021

Public Willingness to Pay for Gray Wolf Conservation

Bringing back large carnivores to human-dominated landscapes is a challenging and costly process. While urban public and international conservation bodies are removed from the physical threats posed by predators, rural populations and livestock producers may have to bear the costs of threats to their safety and properties. According to WDFW, the combined cost of the government-funded nonlethal wolf conservation in Washington state amounted to USD1.52 million in the 2019 Fiscal year. However, funding such management may not be prioritized by governments if the wolf population is recovered and has been removed from federal protection.

In my undergraduate honors thesis advised by Dr. John Marzluff and Dr. Sergey Rabotyagov at UW SEFS, I evaluated the feasibility of using financial tools to support the wolf-livestock coexistence program in eastern Washington state. My team and I conducted a choice experiment to determine the socio-political factors influencing residents’ willingness to pay for a coexistence program that can support current wolf conservation and compensate for the damages to livestock producers. We find that respondents would support a public-funded program led by ranchers and local communities to mitigate wolf-livestock conflicts. Such a program also provides outreach opportunities for ranchers and conservation practitioners to communicate and collaborate with the urban public for long-term conservation efforts.

Link to full article

Foraging Ecology of Canada Jay

Canada jays (Perisoreus canadensis) are a small bird species that belong to the crow family and can be found year-round in the boreal forests of North America. Unlike other migratory birds that seek areas with abundant food resources while the long winters approach the arctic tundra, Canada jays rely on perishable foods, such as berries, insects, and small mammals, that they cache in their territories during the fall to survive the harsh winter and early breeding periods.

In the fall of 2018, I had the opportunity to assist Dr. Kaeli Swift and biologists at Denali National Park in studying the foraging ecology of Canada jays. To better understand the foraging behavior of the jays, we observed and recorded the foraging behavior of 13 groups across the park and analyzed the distribution of their cache locations using ArcGIS. With the data collected in the field, we are particularly interested in examining whether the foraging behavior of Canada jays varied based on the environmental conditions and available resources in their territories.

Publications

Senior, Rebecca A., Ruby Bagwyn, Danyan Leng, Alexander K. Killion, Walter Jetz, and David S. Wilcove. 2024. “Global Shortfalls in Documented Actions to Conserve Biodiversity.” Nature 630 (8016): 387–91. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07498-7.

Eeden, Lily M. van, Carol Bogezi, Danyan Leng, John M. Marzluff, Aaron J. Wirsing, and Sergey Rabotyagov. 2021. “Public Willingness to Pay for Gray Wolf Conservation that Could Support a Rancher-Led Wolf-Livestock Coexistence Program.” Biological Conservation 260 (August): 109226. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.BIOCON.2021.109226

Mallory, Tabitha, Hao Chen, and Danyan Leng. 2021. “China’s Financing and Subsidization of Capture Fisheries at Home and Abroad.” Oceana. https://oceana.org/reports/chinas-fisheries-subsidies-propel-distant-water-fleet/