Research
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The Natural Capital Project advances research frontiers focused on:
- Less-studied yet vital ecosystem services relating to health including improving mental health, promoting physical activity, and supporting urban biodiversity as well as investigating the effects of land use change on vector-borne disease.
- Equity in access to nature and its benefits - developing new assessment approaches.
- Resilience of interconnected human and natural systems.
- Modeling of ecosystem services at the global scale using high performance computing (HPC).
- Using AI for optimization and to generate insights from new data sources such as social media, satellite imagery, and human movement data.
- Unifying ecosystem service data, modeling, and visualization through standardized APIs.
- Connecting natural capital assessments and accounting (NCAA) to policy and finance decisions pathways.
Recent Publications
- Robust Hydropower Planning Balances Energy Generation, Carbon Emissions and Sediment Connectivity in the Mekong River Basin. (2024). Earth’s Future, 12(8), e2023EF003647. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023EF003647
- Dams for hydropower and irrigation: Trends, challenges, and alternatives. (2024). Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 199, 114439. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2024.114439
- Public preferences for coastal adaptation: Economic evidence from a discrete choice experiment for hard structures and nature-based solutions in Miami, Florida.. (2024). Marine Policy, 165, 106217. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2024.106217
- Offsetting the greenhouse gas footprint of hydropower with floating solar photovoltaics. (2024). Nature Sustainability, 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01384-w
- Strategic restoration-development mitigates tradeoffs between hydropower and fish habitat fragmentation in the Mekong. (2024). One Earth. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2024.05.009