As the planet continues to warm, many decision makers are grappling with how best to adapt to our changing climate. But for these decision makers, the most advanced global climate models are also perceived as being too ‘wrong’ to be useful for planning and adaptation. In response, an explosion of higher resolution ‘downscaled’ climate models have emerged…
Synthetic populations are geospatially explicit representations of households and persons. RTI’s nationwide synthetic populations are derived from American Community Survey (ACS) demographic estimates and ACS Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS). These synthetic populations match household spatial distributions at 100M grid cell resolution and household demographic distributions at the census block group resolution. Synthetic populations are…
Combining GPS units with accelerometers is becoming a common method of objectively assessing adult physical activity locations. However, few best practices have been proposed for designing these studies. Using accelerometer and GPS data collected from over 200 adults in five cities, 10+ minute bouts of physical activity were given location codes with a Google Maps-based…
The combination of physical and biological sounds that form the ambient acoustic environment is increasingly recognized as a fundamental element of habitats. Marine soundscapes are known to influence key ecological processes such as reproduction, larval recruitment and trophic interactions, and there is increasing interest in the use of passive acoustic monitoring as a non-destructive habitat…
Originally developed in the fields of architecture and urban design, space syntax is a concept and method used to describe and analyze patterns of space at both the building and urban levels. In particular, space syntax helps us understand the role of spatial configuration within buildings and cities in people’s experiences and use of these…
Wildland fire plays an important role in shaping landscapes across the US. As such, land managers are confronted with numerous questions and issues regarding the management of wildland fire on their lands. These issues involve pre-, during- and post-fire stages of wildland fire and require reliable sources of geospatial data to be addressed. Various agencies,…
Autonomous vehicles will be here soon and will cause major changes when they arrive, similar to the building of the Interstates in the 1950s. AVs will bring safety, ease congestion, and provide mobility for many people who now find it difficult to travel. They will also erase many jobs, erode highway funding, and take customers…
Boreal and temperate forests have experienced substantial climate change over the last several decades. However, understanding of how changes in climate are affecting these ecosystems is incomplete. Remote sensing provides an important source of information that can help address this information gap. We present results from recent studies that use three decades of Landsat imagery…
Participatory research methods are increasingly used to better understand complex social-environmental problems and design solutions through diverse and inclusive stakeholder engagement. But, participatory research rarely engages stakeholders in co-development and interpretation of computational models that describe system dynamics essential for conceptualizing complex processes and envisioning scenarios of alternate action. Even fewer participatory projects have engaged…
Emergency managers rely on fast and accurate storm surge predictions from numerical models to make decisions and estimate damages during storm events. One of the challenges for such models is providing a high level of resolution along the coast without significantly increasing the computational time. Models with large domains, such as the Advanced CIRCulation (ADCIRC)…