Jiawei Li

I am a PhD student at Fudan University, working with Prof. Jun Ma. My research focuses on the spatiotemporal dynamics of forest landscapes, using remote-sensing technologies to study global deforestation and forest degradation. I am particularly interested in quantifying global forest fragmentation and analyzing its ecological impacts to better understand the role of forests in carbon sequestration and mitigating climate change.

My current research explores land conflicts between forests and croplands, focusing on land area and pattern changes, in collaboration with Prof David Edwards. Dynamic shifts in forest landscapes inevitably lead to changes in surrounding land cover, so how to allocate forests and croplands within limited land resources becomes the central issue of my work. In response to both climate and food crises, cropland expansion through deforestation and forest restoration (e.g., “Grain for Green”) are occurring simultaneously, with the negative impacts of these land conflicts being masked by global net changes in land cover.