About Me
黃浚瑋 Chun-Wei Huang
Associate Professor
General Studies Center, Ming-Chi University of Technology
84 Gungjuan Rd., Taishan Dist., New Taipei City 24301, Taiwan
chun-wei.huang@aya.yale.edu | cwhuang@mail.mcut.edu.tw
I am interested in groundwater conservation, landscape ecology, systematic conservation planning, and land governance related to biodiversity conservation. My expertise consists of artificial intelligence, deep learning, GeoAI, ecological/environmental modeling, and spatial optimization. I am currently working on deep learning-based computer vision technologies for environmental and ecological planning and management.
Enormous unregulated pumping wells increase the risk of groundwater depletion and environmental disasters, such as land subsidence. However, it remains a great challenge to investigate numerous unregulated wells to manage and model groundwater aquifers. To improve the capacity of groundwater governance, we map and locate private wells using deep learning technologies. We trained and validated convolutional neural networks (CNNs), using Google Street View images. We applied the CNNs to a land subsidence area along the Taiwan high-speed rail, termed the Golden Corridor in Taiwan. The results showed that CNNs can recognize pumping wells with at least 90% accuracy. The testing cases showed their capability to recall all the pumping wells in three road segments along the Golden Corridor. Given the prevalence of unknown private pumping in the Choushui River Fan, our image data-driven computer vision approach not only eases labor-intensive private well investigations but also advances hydrologic understanding for groundwater modeling. We enhance comprehension of unknown sinks and provide their spatial distribution to improve groundwater modeling.
The role of land governance in conserving biodiversity (Visiting postdoc project at Yale):
In this project, our focus is on the global influence of urban expansion on biodiversity loss and how weak governance may shape the urban expansion that affects biological conservation.The effects of urban land expansion on places with high conservation value will depend largely on the ability of national and sub-national governments to make policies that can effectively manage and shape urban growth. Our study indicates that if predicted urban expansion continues, by 2030, more than two-thirds of all species impacted by urban expansion will occur in countries with low levels of political stability or regulatory quality. Land-use planning cannot be the sole solution for preventing urban-caused global biodiversity decline, but rather that different categories of countries need contrasting conservation strategies. Countries that have high potential biodiversity impact and low land governance capacity require short-term conservation strategies which facilitate public participation, as well as international aid and development to increase governance capacity. Furthermore, enhanced coordination across different decision-making levels is important so that strategies at a single scale do not counterbalance efforts at other levels.
In this project, our focus is on the global influence of urban expansion on biodiversity loss and how weak governance may shape the urban expansion that affects biological conservation.The effects of urban land expansion on places with high conservation value will depend largely on the ability of national and sub-national governments to make policies that can effectively manage and shape urban growth. Our study indicates that if predicted urban expansion continues, by 2030, more than two-thirds of all species impacted by urban expansion will occur in countries with low levels of political stability or regulatory quality. Land-use planning cannot be the sole solution for preventing urban-caused global biodiversity decline, but rather that different categories of countries need contrasting conservation strategies. Countries that have high potential biodiversity impact and low land governance capacity require short-term conservation strategies which facilitate public participation, as well as international aid and development to increase governance capacity. Furthermore, enhanced coordination across different decision-making levels is important so that strategies at a single scale do not counterbalance efforts at other levels.
Biodiversity impact due to urbanization overlapped with land governance represented by the WGIs (Hunag et al., 2018). Countries in red will face to integrated impact by low level of land governance and high level of urban expansion on biodiversity areas.
Systematic conservation planning & Ecological modeling:
I am interested in how to design a suitable landscape structure for conservation purposes. I developed a spatial optimization-based land-use allocation model, termed Dynamically Dimensioned Search Landscape Optimization Planning model (DDSLOP), which can effectively deliver optimized landscape designs for conserving bird species by promoting their habitat suitability. Furthermore, the multi-objective DDSLOP was applied to advance the guidelines of landscape design by taking the trade-off between suitability indices of species and human habitat into consideration. As such, the study can help identify the potential of synergic use of land resources for urban development and biological conservation.
