2010 — 2016 |
Larson, Kelli Kirkwood, Craig Smith, Kerry Redman, Charles (co-PI) [⬀] White, Dave Nelson, Margaret (co-PI) [⬀] Gober, Patricia (co-PI) [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Dmuu: Decision Center For a Desert City Ii: Urban Climate Adaptation @ Arizona State University
The scale, scope, and uncertainties associated with climate change pose formidable challenges for scientists, policy makers, and citizens. Cities in arid locales around the world urgently need integrative research with a long-term perspective to provide a sound scientific basis for policy making to improve adaptive capacity in the face of climate change. The Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC), which initially was established in 2004, is a boundary organization at the interface of science and policy that advances the scientific basis for water management decision making in the face of climatic uncertainty in the Phoenix metropolitan area of Arizona. This collaborative group will use additional funding to expand its already extensive interaction with the policy-making community, thus improving links between scientific knowledge and action. The investigators will develop fundamental new knowledge about decision making under uncertainty from three perspectives: climatic uncertainties, urban-system impacts, and adaptation decisions. As a boundary organization, DCDC scientists will use social science principles to develop and test a more integrated decision-support process for policy making in this complex environment. They will examine the interconnected water, energy, and land-use decisions that exist in a complex dynamic urban system under climate change. The previously developed DCDC WaterSim model will be refined to capture the scale dynamics, economic feedbacks, and distributional effects associated with climate-change decisions in the face of climate uncertainty. The DCDC collaborative group will work closely with the NSF-funded Central Arizona Phoenix Long Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) project to measure, monitor, and model tradeoffs among ecosystem services, social equity, and economic well-being.
DCDC research will produce new knowledge about individual and societal responses to climate change and the best practices for linking science and decision making to improve outcomes. New knowledge about urban-system dynamics will provide a better scientific basis for adaptation strategies to make cities less climate-sensitive, while new knowledge about effective approaches to decision making in the face of long-term environmental risk will aid in formulating approaches to developing and implementing these strategies. DCDC research will link knowledge about water supply and demand under current and future climate conditions with social science research on decision making, thereby providing an improved basis for scientists, policy makers, and other stakeholders to collaborate and to create and evaluate approaches to adaption in the face of climate change. The DCDC educational program will help educate and train the next generation of scholars who can move easily between the worlds of science and policy to improve society's ability to adapt to a changing climate. This collaborative group project is supported by the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences through its Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU) competition.
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0.915 |
2011 — 2016 |
Larson, Kelli Hall, Sharon [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Collaborative Research: Ecological Homogenization of Urban America @ Arizona State University
Urban, suburban and exurban environments are important ecosystems and their extent is increasing in the U.S. The conversion of wild or managed ecosystems to urban ecosystems is resulting in ecosystem homogenization across cities, where neighborhoods in very different parts of the country have similar patterns of roads, residential lots, commercial areas and aquatic features. Funds are provided to test the hypothesis that this homogenization alters ecological structure and functions relevant to ecosystem carbon and nitrogen dynamics, with continental scale implications. The research will provide a framework for understanding the impacts of urban land use change from local to continental scales. The research encompasses datasets ranging from household surveys to regional-scale remote sensing across six metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) that cover the major climatic regions of the US (Phoenix, AZ, Miami, FL, Baltimore, MD, Boston, MA, St. Paul, MN and Los Angeles, CA) to determine how household characteristics correlate with landscaping decisions, land management practices and ecological structure and functions at local, regional and continental scales. This research will transform scientific understanding of an important and increasingly common ecosystem type (?suburbia?) and the consequences to carbon storage and nitrogen pollution at multiple scales. In addition, it will advance understanding of how humans perceive, value and manage their surroundings. The award will leverage an extensive, multi-scale program of education and outreach associated with ongoing LTER and/or ULTRA-EX projects. Activities include K-12 education and outreach to community groups, city/regional planners, natural history museums, state and local agencies and non-governmental organizations. Graduate students will participate in a Distributed Graduate Seminar in Sustainability Science (DGSS) initiated by NCEAS and the University of Minnesota Institute on Environment.
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0.915 |
2012 — 2017 |
Larson, Kelli Sabo, John [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Wsc- Category 3: Collaborative Research:Water Sustainability Under Near -Term Climate Change:a Cross-Regional Analysis Incorporating Socio-Ecological Feedbacks and Adaptations @ Arizona State University
1204368/1204396/1204478 Sankarasubraman Arumugam/ John Kominoski/ John Sabo North Carolina State University/University of Georgia Research Foundation Inc./Arizona State University
Water resource availability varies across the Sunbelt of the United States with a sharp East-West transition at 105 degrees W. Arid regions west of the 105th Meridian produce less runoff compared to humid regions in the East that produce greater than 40 cm of mean annual runoff. Consequently, reservoirs in the West are over-year systems holding multiple years of inflows, whereas reservoirs in the East are within-year storage systems with the need to refill the system in the beginning of spring. Accordingly, water policies also differ substantially with western states pursuing ("prior appropriation") and the eastern states following ("riparian rights") for allocation. These contrasting strategies also impact freshwater biodiversity with the ratio of non-native to native fish species being nearly 6 times higher in the West compared to the East. In spite of these cross-regional differences, both regions face two common stressors: (a) uncertainty in available freshwater arising from global climate change and (b) increased human demand due to population growth and consumption. Consequently, there is an ever-increasing need for an integrated assessment of freshwater sustainability under these two stressors over the planning horizon (10-30 years). The main objective of this study is to understand and quantify the potential impacts of near-term climate change and population growth on freshwater sustainability - defined here as integrating daily to annual flows required to minimize human vulnerability and maximize ecosystem needs (including native biodiversity) for freshwater - by explicitly incorporating the feedbacks from human-environmental systems on water supply and demand in various target basins spanning Arizona to North Carolina. Using retro-analyses involving AR5 multimodel climate change hindcasts, we will revisit how freshwater sustainability could have been better achieved over the past five decades across the Sunbelt. To couple the hydroclimatic and hydro-ecological system dynamics with the management of freshwater infrastructure systems, a two-level agent-based modeling framework will explicitly simulate adaptive behaviors and feedbacks between policy and consumers.
This interdisciplinary project will involve collaboration among three universities, North Carolina State University (NCSU), Arizona State University (ASU), and University of Georgia (UGA). Findings from the AR5 retro-analyses will evaluate and recommend societal options (i.e., supply augmentation vs. demand reduction) for promoting future (2015-2034) freshwater sustainability across the Sunbelt. Cross-regional synthesis of policies and media sources for the targeted basins will identify de-centralized adaptive strategies that have been employed independently and collectively to maintain flows, increase supplies, or reduce demands. Utilizing the near-term hydroclimatic projections, PIs will quantify how current policies on reservoir operations and groundwater extraction could impact the reliability of future water supplies for cities and also alter the key attributes of hydrographs that are critical for maintaining freshwater biodiversity. In doing so, the project will also investigate the degree to which regions have pursued "hard path" (i.e., supply augmentation) vs. "soft path" (i.e., demand reduction) strategies by explicitly modeling potential societal interventions for freshwater sustainability. The educational goal of the project is to conduct an online distributed seminar in which Honors, MS and PhD students from three Universities with interdisciplinary backgrounds will produce a policy-oriented white paper based on the key findings. Based on the white paper, the project team will distribute a suite of podcasts on freshwater sustainability and climate change to middle and high school science programs from the targeted basin states as well as to key water policy institutions across the region. Podcasts, developed data, tools and publications will also be disseminated through the main project portal at NCSU, and additionally through the National Climate Assessment and ASU's Central Arizona - Phoenix LTER websites.
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0.915 |
2015 — 2019 |
Larson, Kelli Hanemann, Michael (co-PI) [⬀] White, Dave Vivoni, Enrique (co-PI) [⬀] Wutich, Amber |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Dmuu: Dcdc Iii: Transformational Solutions For Urban Water Sustainability Transitions in the Colorado River Basin @ Arizona State University
This collaborative research group will generate the analytical framework and empirical results necessary to theorize environmental decision making under uncertainty for urban water systems. One main concern about environmental uncertainties for cities in the Colorado River Basin is the anticipated impact on water resources. Possible impacts, such as rising temperatures, changes in the amount and timing of precipitation, and increased variability, likely will reduce renewable surface and groundwater supplies and diminish water quality leading to widespread but uneven risks. The projected biophysical impacts of environmental change are conditioned by and interact with land-use changes, population dynamics, economic development, and water-management decisions. Managing transitions toward urban water sustainability will require innovative approaches to water governance that are anticipatory, adaptable, just, and evidence-supported. This collaborative group includes a transdisciplinary team of social, behavioral, economic, and sustainability scientists working in close collaboration with stakeholders. A diverse group of undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral scholars will be educated and trained with a focus on key competencies in sustainability through real-world sustainability research and education experiences. The collaborative group will build and strengthen networks of scientists and decision makers that improve the relevance of scientific knowledge for decisions and foster social learning among diverse perspectives.
Drawing from use-inspired sustainability science and decision making under uncertainty, the investigators will address the overarching question: Given environmental and societal uncertainties, how can cities dependent on the Colorado River Basin develop transformational solutions to implement water sustainability transitions? This research program is comprised of four Integrated Project Areas: 1) Regional environmental and land-use changes as biophysical drivers that affect decision making; 2) Actors, institutions, and governance as socioeconomic drivers that affect decision making; 3) Simulation modeling, visual analytics, and scenarios for knowledge integration and exchange; and 4) Evidence-supported transition strategies toward sustainable water governance. This approach enables the investigators to evaluate how urban water system decisions are affected by environmental and land use changes conditioned by and interacting with social, institutional, and economic processes; model, simulate, visualize, and explore alternative futures in complex social-ecological-technical systems; and conduct comparative studies to develop scientific knowledge with explicit consideration of specific contextual factors and generalizable patterns. This collaborative group project is supported by the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences through its Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU) funding opportunity.
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0.915 |
2017 — 2020 |
Hall, Sharon [⬀] Larson, Kelli |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Collaborative Research: Msb-Fra: Alternative Futures For the American Residential Macrosystem @ Arizona State University
An apparent, but untested result of changes to the urban landscape is the homogenization of cities, such that neighborhoods in very different parts of the country increasingly exhibit similar patterns in their road systems, residential lots, commercial sites, and aquatic areas; cities have now become more similar to each other than to the native ecosystems that they replaced. This research builds on the team?s prior NSF funded research on the ?ecological homogenization? of the ?American Residential Macrosystem (ARM)? and specifically investigates factors that contribute to stability and/or changes in the ARM. The aim is to determine how factors that effect change?such as shifts in human demographics, desires for biodiversity and water conservation, regulations that govern water use and quality, and dispersal of organisms?will interact with factors that contribute to stability such as social norms, property values, neighborhood and city covenants and laws, and commercial interests. The project will determine ecological implications of alternative futures of the ARM for the assembly of ecological communities, ecosystem function, and responses to environmental change and disturbance at parcel (ecosystem), landscape (city), regional (Metropolitan Statistical Area) and continental scales. Five types of residential parcels as well as embedded semi-natural interstitial ecosystems will be studied, across six U.S. cities (Boston, Baltimore, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, and Los Angeles). Education and outreach work will focus on K-12 teachers and students and on collaborative policy efforts with city, county, and state environmental managers.
This project investigates urbanization?s impact on the ecological homogenization of the American Residential Macrosystem (ARM) in terms of plant biodiversity, soil carbon and nitrogen cycle pools and processes, microclimate, hydrography, and land cover. This similarity of ecological characteristics is driven by complex and dynamic human actions at multiple scales?e.g., parcel, neighborhood, and region?that will shape the structure and function of the ARM over 50 to 100 year time frames, with potentially significant continental scale effects on ecological processes and environmental quality. This research addresses two core questions. First, what factors contribute to maintenance and change in the ARM? While this macrosystem is a relatively homogeneous mixture of grass lawns, shrubs, trees and impervious surfaces, there is a critical need to determine how drivers of change such as shifts in human population and ethnicity, increasing desires for biodiversity and water conservation, and regulations governing water use and quality will interact with stabilizing factors such as social norms, property values, neighborhood and city covenants and laws, and commercial interests. Researchers will test the hypothesis that that although dispersal from natural and interstitial areas, climate change, and changes in homeowner knowledge will promote ecological change; institutions, norms and values will function as counteracting, stabilizing forces on these ecological dynamics. This hypothesis will be tested by evaluating the factors that motivate change and stability at multiple scales. Results will be used to produce quantitative, data-based scenarios of future land-use patterns in the ARM. Second, what are the ecological implications of alternative futures of this macrosystem for community assembly and ecosystem function at parcel (ecosystem), landscape (city), regional (Metropolitan Statistical Area), and continental scales? The hypothesis to be tested is that management that promotes nutrient- and water-use efficient and wildlife-supporting plants as well as lower inputs of water and nutrients will give rise to greater regional biodiversity across trophic levels, higher nutrient retention, lower water use, and reduced runoff and losses of soil carbon and nitrogen from residential yards at the regional scale. Five types of residential parcels that vary in management goals and intensity and embedded semi-natural interstitial ecosystems will be studied in six U.S. cities across the U.S. (Boston, Baltimore, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, and Los Angeles), to quantify influences on ecological dynamics. This information will be linked to land use scenarios to address the regional and continental-scale impacts of these effects. Three postdocs will be mentored as co-investigators on this project. The research program will also include interaction with municipal decision makers focused on sustainability and add a new ?Panel of Experts? feature to the YardMap citizen science program developed at Cornell University.
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0.915 |