Deciding upon an appropriate spatial frame of reference is an important component of any observational analysis. Geographically fixed frameworks are not always well suited to meteorology, which can be described as the study of patterns within a moving fluid. Data visualization also needs to navigate around human cognitive limitations such as motion-induced failure to detect…
The importance of freshwater ecosystems in the terrestrial carbon balance from watersheds to the globe has been increasingly recognized over the last two decades. While global-scale annual carbon exports from rivers to the oceans are reasonably well constrained, large uncertainties remain at other spatial and temporal scales for lateral transport and other fluxes. Measurements are…
The City of Raleigh leverages GIS data and technology to support a variety of services and solutions. These range from more efficient management of assets to real time status of parking spaces, and from coordinating capital construction projects to interactive scenario-based 3D urban environments. This presentation will focus on how Raleigh balances a robust, stable,…
Humanity has embarked on an age of rapid global changes across biophysical and social-economic conditions so great that it has been labeled the Anthropocene. As global climate changes and urban populations expand, society is increasingly reliant on smaller and more fragmented areas for ecosystem services. These services include carbon sequestration, the uptake of excess nutrient…
The large-scale introduction of water reuse into an existing water supply system is a complex socio-technical process. Consumers drive the success of water reuse programs through adoption, and infrastructure designs affect adoption patterns. This research develops a modeling framework to capture the feedbacks among consumer adoption and infrastructure expansion. Two theories are applied and compared…
The World Economic Forum contends that we are in the midst of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. The revolution is characterized by “a ubiquitous and mobile internet, by smaller, cheaper, and more powerful sensors, and by artificial intelligence and machine learning.” It is manifest in an "Internet of Things” that's expected to connect 50 billion devices,…
Environmental justice and sustainability are two critical, but often separate initiatives undertaken by NGOs, planners, government agencies, and grassroots groups. This presentation includes three cases in which environmental justice concerns confuse conventional discourses of sustainability (soil lead and urban gardens, home foreclosure and vacant lot reuse, and legacy pollution and waterfront development). Collectively, these works…
Expert-based science is widely on the decline when it comes to computing- and data-based inference worldwide for land- and seascapes as well as the atmosphere. The status of associated biodiversity and its conservation is equally in a crisis-state. In this presentation I will show how open access to data -including citizen science - has provided…
The usual views of air traffic — a single plane in the sky, several planes on approach, even the route map in the back of the in-flight magazine — are deceptive. The truth is that air traffic (and its counterpart, maritime traffic) is a big, messy, complex, ever-evolving morass where this morning’s anomaly is this…
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…