Recent Projects
Artes. Principal architect of the Artes model, which simulates and optimizes local water supplies in LA for 9 million people, considering ecological, social, engineering, and economic factors.
The LA Water Hub. Led the development of a dynamic mapping and visualization site for a multi-year research project on water resources management in Los Angeles.
The LA Solar Prioritization Tool. Project manager and lead analyst for development of a prioritization tool for optimizing placement of distributed solar resources in LA County considering consumption, potential on-site generation, and grid constraints in 1.6 million properties.
Evaluating the Effects of Turf Replacement Programs in Los Angeles. Led the drafting of the final report of findings from a multidisciplinary research project to examine the effects of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California’s 2014 turf replacement program during the California drought.
California Groundwater Contamination Risk Index (GRID). Online tool for mapping groundwater contamination risk for disadvantaged communities in California.
Research Themes
Urban Water Management
Stormwater Management
Urban stormwater infrastructure traditionally promoted conveyance. In the coming era of stormwater management, however, new technologies and governance structures are increasingly important. Cities are increasingly designing stormwater infrastructure that integrates both conveyance and infiltration in hybrid systems to achieve public health, safety, environmental, and social goals. In addition, cities face decisions about distribution of responsibilities for stormwater management and maintenance between institutions and landowners. Hybrid governance structures combine centralized and distributed management to facilitate planning, operations, funding, and maintenance. Effective governance in any management approach will require changes in the expertise of stormwater agencies. Recognizing the distinction between hybrid infrastructure and hybrid governance is important in long-term planning decisions for construction and management of stormwater systems.
Renewable Energy
The California Center for Sustainable Communities hosts the L.A. Energy Atlas, an online platform for downloading and visualizing energy use data across L.A. County. I led research to analyze energy use data in relation to structural characteristics of buildings, social and demographic changes, and varying climates. The research has charted new paths for data-driven analysis of energy systems management and helped inform energy efficiency policies in California. In addition, as part of a project to develop an Advanced Energy Community in Los Angeles County, we created an online tool for prioritizing the location of distributed solar energy resources in LA considering on-site consumption and electricity grid constraints.
Urban Flood Planning
As an affiliate researcher through Sustainable Cities International, I worked with an organization in Los Cabos, IMPLAN, to conduct analysis and modeling for urban sustainability planning and water management. I conducted modeling and analysis to support planning frameworks for urban development in a landscape crossed by regional arroyos, which are seasonally-flooded riverbeds.
Environmental Decision-Making
Data-driven analysis and models can help inform environmental decision-making for the 21st Century. Managing resources, in cities and far beyond their borders, requires understanding the many needs that humans place on surrounding ecosystems and the potential adverse affects. Through work in transboundary water management and urban water management, I have developed with collaborators models that inform policy and decision-making processes. The primary goal is to answer the challenging big-picture questions.
Network Theory and Resilience
Resilience is a broad term used to describe systems management across engineering, natural resources, public policy, and risk management. From its roots in physics and ecology literature, the concept has expanded to describe a wide set of heuristics that imply varying theoretical, practical, and policy management approaches across fields. Ecological resilience emphasizes system persistence and the role of connectivity between species in an ecosystem, acknowledging uncertainty and the potential for system reorganization.
Engineering resilience emphasizes stability of performance as measured by minimizing deviations from desired outcomes. Ecology literature places connectivity within ecosystem components at the core of resilience, which is also central to many technology management challenges. Network theory metrics measure connectivity in many human and engineered systems and provide an opportunity to integrate notions of ecological resilience into technical analysis of water distribution networks (WDNs).
Resilient management of environmental resources also requires cross-disciplinary modeling that can assess across multiple objectives. In the Modoc Plateau, environmental and agricultural groups all view the encroachment of juniper trees as a management challenge. As part of work with ecologists and economists at UC Davis, we developed a multi-objective optimization framework to identify areas for treating juniper that balanced benefits to farmers and threatened Sage Steppe species.
Environmental Flows
The Rio Grande/Rio Bravo (RGB) designates the border between the U.S. and Mexico for over 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles). The Big Bend region is a prominent area of designated nature preserves that spans territory in both the U.S. and Mexico with clear indicators of ecological degradation. Due to factors of climate, location, population, and water demands across agricultural, municipal and industrial sectors, the RGB basin is one of the most water-stressed regions in the world. Extended droughts and projected climate change impacts combine with over-allocation of water rights, inefficient irrigation, and international agreements to make water management in the basin technically complex and politically challenging. I am working with collaborators (Professor Sam Sandoval Solis, UC Davis) to develop integrated hydrologic and optimization model to incorporate environmental flow requirements into multi-objective management of a transboundary river basin. Modeling can optimize reservoir operations to increase environmental flows in the Big Bend region while meeting water demand and international treaty constraints.
Urban Groundwater Management
Cities use groundwater as a clean, cost-effective source of water supply. Many regions utilize nearby aquifers heavily during early expansion, which help them to grow wealth and improve health conditions. Continued economic expansion increases potential for overuse of “common” resources. Industrialization in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century often fueled heavy groundwater pumping as industrial users exploited cheap and accessible water to support expansion. Problems from groundwater overdraft such as subsidence, rising pumping costs, contamination, and resource depletion spurred cities to seek alternative water sources and develop governance structures to regulate groundwater pumping. Across many cities, a pattern emerges of early exploitation, followed by acquisition of alternative sources, conservation, and more effective management. Groundwater use and urbanization are shown to be related through progressive eras of development, each with distinct characteristics of infrastructure, environmental quality, and institutions. Arid and coastal industrialized cities are demonstrating a new era for groundwater management: conjunctive use of surface and groundwater resources through advanced treatment, recycling, managed infiltration, and groundwater banking. I am conducting research to develop frameworks for understanding the role of groundwater in urban development.
Reference Library
The 21st century calls for new ways to manage and share references. Zotero, developed by a highly innovative group at George Mason University, provides a great tool for this task. Here is a link an ever-growing Zotero library.