Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability

Zhixun is a visiting PhD student from Xiamen University working with Jianguo "Jack" Liu. His broad research interest is in sustainability science, including metacoupled human and natural systems, ecosystem service flows, ecosystem services and biodiversity, carbon neutrality, virtual resource transfer, environmental footprint, ecological economics, etc.

He focuses on interdisciplinary studies among geography, ecology and environment, socioeconomics, spatial econometrics, and spatial statistics to integrate multiple disciplines and techniques. He specializes in spatiotemporal assessment and modeling by integrating GIS, artificial intelligence and deep learning, econometrics and spatial econometrics, industrial ecology, spatial syntax, management, and statistical methodologies.

In his past studies, he constructed and mapped a novel hierarchy of human needs for ecosystem services, and conducted a large-scale assessment integrating ecosystem service flows and real human needs between China and the United States. Furthermore, he developed a novel approach integrating ecosystem services and biodiversity to identify prioritized nature reserves, which can be employed to evaluate the effectiveness of existing ecological redline.