2/1/2018 Project funded by University at Buffalo

A project, “Integrated Modeling of Climate Change and Human Influence on Land Use and Hydrology with Remote Sensing”, is funded by UB RENEW Institute seed grant.

The project’s principal investigator is Le Wang, PhD, Professor in the Department of Geography, and National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis. Co-principal investigators are: Susan Clark, PhD, Research Scientist at RENEW, Jessica Cao, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health, and Zhenduo Zhu, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering.

This project extends the research frontier of sustainability science by developing scenario-based policy analysis, coupled with a gridded hydrological model, for the purpose of assisting farmers as well as watershed and forest managers in managing the complexity of coupled human and natural systems. The Upper Mississippi River Basin (UMRB), which produces approximately 52% of the nation's corn and 41% of the nation's soybean exports, is selected as the study area. A multidisciplinary team will collaborate to develop a spatially- explicit integrated model of both discrete (agent-based) human and continuous (stock-flow) environmental system dynamics intrinsic to land use change and consequences in the UMRB.