Urban Dynamics:
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Land Use and Land Cover ModelingUnderstanding how land use and land cover (LULC) will change in the future is critical for ensuring sufficient balance between meeting social needs while protecting natural resources. We're developing high resolution urban and non-urban models of LULC change by downscaling global-scale socioeconomic estimates to local scales through landscape constraints. We used hybridized statistical and determinstic (cellular automata) approaches to simulate long-term projections.
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Environmental FlowsRiver and stream ecosystems harbor biodiverse communities and services provided to humanity. Protection and restoration of natural flow regimes promotes sustenance of high levels of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Of particular importance within these efforts is documenting scientifically based hydrologic thresholds, beyond which river ecosystems experience ecological degradation, such as loss of fish species, habitat, or important services. The aim of this research is to document hydrologic thresholds, thereby expanding the lines of evidence, scientific foundation, and justifiable underpinnings for specific environmental flow targets. Multiple quantitative modeling approaches will be utilized to quantify hydrologic thresholds, along with measures of uncertainty.
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Energy TransitionsTransitioning our society towards carbon-neutral energy sources requires substantial infrastructure - this demands that we rethinkhow we address energy demands but also environmental outcomes. As solar and wind growth continues, research is needed to minimize environmental impacts, including land consumption, metaloid mining, and transportation of materials (which is primarily fossil fuel based). Hydropower also provides benefits of storage and counterbalancing other intermittent renewables. While dams provide many services to society, dams impose many negative impacts on rivers, including hydrologic alteration, water quality changes, and habitat fragmentation. We conduct integrative cost-benefit tradeoffs of future scenarios of renewable expansion regarding mitigating carbon emissions, life cycle footprints, and implications to biodiversity conservation. We ask the question, "How do we increase renewables with little impact to the enviroment?"
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Autonomous Biological MonitoringMonitoring fish and invertebrates in waterbodies is fun, but it's also hard work, takes alot of time, requires taxonomic expertise, and might cost a lot of money. What if there were technologies that made monitoring easier and more efficient without sacrificing the quality of data? We are researching hard- and soft-ware systems that utilize artificial intelligence to image and classify fish and invertebrate taxa. We are determining how well these technologies can identify individual taxa, as well as community-level metrics. We are also hoping to apply this research to monitoring fish passage at barriers and dams.
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Infrastructure SustainabilityHow can you predict what future water infrastructure will look like? Will we use the same technologies? Where will it be located? Are there ways to benefit the environment while maximizing resilience to water availability shortages? Here we used a combination of scenario development, model analysis, and geospatial data compilation to determine optimal futures.
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