Working with the Food Policy Council and the San Antonio Office of Innovation to explore the multiple benefits that could flow to people from further investment in vacant lands in the city.
Exploring offshore wind energy tradeoffs.
We explored how siting the first-in-the-nation offshore wind energy farm might impact views from along the coastline. We developed an approach for deriving visibility maps based on the location and duration of viewing by residents and visitors. We illuminated tradeoffs by comparing these visibility maps to wind energy value maps.
Articulating the benefits of urban nature to inform urban planning.
We worked with the World Bank, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and local planners in Guangzhou in two different contexts: the Haizhu wetland and the New Knowledge City.
We are working with the De Leo lab at Stanford University to develop an easy-to-use tool for quantifying and mapping schistosomiasis risk associated with dam construction and reservoir management. While our research is centered in Senegal, it has impact potential wherever schistosomiasis is found. Funding: NSF EEID
We are working to better understand the impacts of land use and climate on the risk of vector-borne diseases, and especially mosquito-borne disease, in Latin America. In partnership with researchers in the United States and Peru, we are advancing scientific understanding of the relationship between land use, human behavior and vector-borne disease, with a focus on the Madre de Dios region of Peru. We are also developing new models to map and quantify the impacts of land use decisions on disease risk in Madre de Dios and elsewhere in Latin America.
We are developing an open-source computer vision algorithm to detect the location of dams from high resolution satellite imagery, enabling us to map the location of dams worldwide whose locations have not been systematically available.
Gross Ecosystem Product (GEP) is an index, modeled after Gross Domestic Product (GDP), that provides a clear signal of the value of nature's contribution to human wellbeing. It has been developed and piloted from city to national scales in China, and has been officially adopted by the United Nations Statistical Commission as part of the UN-SEEA system of ecosystem accounting. Project partners: NatCap Stanford, NatCap University of Minnesota, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Funding: Chinese Academy of Sciences, Stanford gift funds.
Quantifying potential improvements in economic returns, greenhouse gas emissions, water quality, and biodiversity through more efficient and effective land use change, for countries globally.Partners: NatCap at Stanford and University of Minnesota; The World
Evaluated various scenarios of shade-grown coffee implementation throughout Costa Rica’s agricultural sector to quantify potential improvement in carbon storage, pollinator abundance, crop yield, sedimentation, and water quality, and to improve traceability and sustainability of shade-grown coffee in the sector. Collaborators: Coffee Institute of Costa Rica (ICAFE).
The Biosphere Futures project - www.biospherefutures.net - offers an online database of scenario planning case studies from all over the world. The overarching aim is to support sustainable development of the Biosphere. We focus on scenarios that explore the interactions and interdependencies between humans and ecosystems. Partners: Stockholm Resilience Centre, NatCap Stanford. Collaborators:Azote, Colectivo Fractal.
