Biomass feedstock utilization has the potential to reduce dependency on fossil fuels and improve energy security while decarbonizing our energy needs. Energy crops, short rotation woody crops, municipal solid waste, and agricultural and forest residues are considered promising sources of renewable energy. Computer modeling has proven to be a key tool towards minimizing logistics cost.…

A spatial perspective isn’t (just) about making compelling visualizations, but also investigating how complex human-environment interactions impact the theory, design, methods and infrastructure of research. Detangling how place impacts, interacts with and/or drives factors of health outcomes for different people and neighborhoods is essential to reducing health disparities. In this forum talk, Dr. Kolak highlights…

Come learn about some of the most widely adopted machine learning methods used for clustering of spatial data. This forum will illustrate how the algorithms work, how to interpret the results, and how and when to apply them.  We’ll go beyond the basics of several key spatial data science techniques, including density-based clustering and multivariate…

Cucurbit downy mildew exhibits significant long distance dispersal within the continental United States. The disease is characterized by annual extinction and recolonization cycles that make it an excellent model system to understand and quantify epidemic expansion in both time and space. Using disease records collected as part of a cucurbit downy mildew monitoring system, the…

Insured flood loss in Texas has risen rapidly since 1978, totaling nearly $16.4 billion USD by the end of 2021. These losses have been predominantly concentrated in coastal and urban areas where changes in extreme precipitation coupled with rapid population growth at the coastal margin and in upland areas have dramatically altered the hydrologic response…

Managing natural resources is fraught with uncertainty around how complex ecosystems will respond to management actions and a changing climate. A range of scientific tools can help grapple with different aspects of this challenge, but they are often used independently. This forum presentation describes a series of projects that have leveraged the complementary strengths of…

The increasing volume and diversity of sources of geospatial data have created both opportunities and challenges for environmental management studies. Combining and extracting the information contained in these rich multisource data enable novel views and the development of a comprehensive and detailed knowledge basis of the environmental dynamics of both rapidly changing events (e.g. floods)…

The discipline of land change science has been evolving rapidly in the past decades. Remote sensing has played a major role in one of the most critical components of land change science, which includes observation, monitoring, and characterization of land change. In this forum presentation, Dr. Zhu will first introduce a new remote sensing perspective…

Long-Term Outcomes of Recognizing Indigenous Property Rights to Water Summary: Restoring natural resource access for Indigenous groups has become a recent policy focus. We combine satellite data and robust difference-in-difference methods to estimate the causal effect of water right settlements on Native American reservations in the western United States over 1974-2012. Settlements increase agricultural land…

Oppressive Infrastructures: Mapping Racism and Inequity in the Built Environment Summary: This Forum presentation features research produced in DIY Cartography, a graduate-level research seminar at NC State’s College of Design from Spring 2022 led by Professors Tania Allen and Sara Queen, which examines the history of inequity in our built environment. The featured maps highlight…