In addition to the most pressing issues of the day, scholars at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies focus their research on many regions of the world, from Beijing to Brazil.
Research Spotlight
The Ripple Effects of China’s College Expansion on American Universities
Researchers at SCCEI trace how China’s unprecedented expansion of higher education has impacted U.S. graduate education and local economies surrounding college towns.
While Nayib Bukele's style of authoritarianism may have some successes on paper, Beatriz Magaloni and Alberto Diaz-Cayeros argue that the regime is headed for a reckoning.
Time for Iran to Make a No-enrichment Nuclear Deal
The time has come for Iran’s leaders to reconsider their past intransigent, deceptive posture and instead pursue a nuclear power program that will benefit the Iranian people, write Abbas Milani and Siegfried Hecker.
Global Ecology and Conservation,
September 26, 2019
Over 240 migratory water bird species depend on China's 18,000 km coastline as a vital stopover area. However, the rapid loss of natural wetlands has threatened this seasonal water bird migration over the last few decades. In the present study, to improve our understanding of the pattern and amount of habitat loss in key stopover areas (KSAs) and the spatial covariance between habitat loss and economic development, we conducted a spatially explicit evaluation of coastal habitat loss in KSAs and explored its relationship with social and economic dynamics along the China coast by integrating high-spatial resolution satellite imagery with an updated coastal water bird investigation data set. The remote sensing survey detected a habitat loss percentage of 19.4% in the KSAs during 2000 and 2010. Aquaculture, urbanization, and land reclamation were responsible for the most severe disturbances to coastal habitats. These results demonstrate that the losses of wetland habitats in the KSAs in Chinese coastal areas are more severe than those in other coastal areas even though more protective measures have been implemented in these areas. Risk-based analysis showed that the risk of habitat loss was greatest in undeveloped regions with rich natural wetland and large populations, thereby demonstrating the critical importance of shifting the focus of water bird conservation to these regions to ensure the conservation of migratory water birds in the East Asian–Australasian Flyway. These findings disagree with the hypothesis that more habitats are lost when the economy is more developed. Therefore, we suggest that focusing conservation decisions on areas undergoing urbanization might improve the effectiveness of conservation measures given the pressures due to various forms of wetland exploitation.
