Urban Ecology

LiDAR and field-based study of riparian forest structure along Red Butte Creek, Utah, finding that land use transitions — especially individual landowner decisions — decouple urban riparian vegetation from stream hydrology, producing exceptionally tall canopies in older residential reaches while native species dominate the protected canyon upstream.

First study to model net VMT, fuel consumption, CO₂, and criteria air pollutant impacts of an entire US transit system at hourly and city-block spatial resolution, combining UTA’s electronic fare collection and automated passenger counter data with GTFS service schedules — finding that UTA collectively offsets ~1.5% of seven-county onroad emissions, with strong spatial and temporal heterogeneity by mode, time of day, and season.

Forward projection of building-sector fossil fuel CO₂ emissions under two 2040 growth scenarios for the Salt Lake Valley, translating EnvisionTomorrow+ regional planning data into parcel-scale building stock changes and reaggregating to the Hestia atmospheric modeling grid for direct comparison with the 2010/2011 baseline inventory.

Scenario-based hydrological modeling study using HSPF to simulate streamflow and sediment yield in the snowmelt-dominated Jordan River watershed under future climate and LULC change — finding that climate change overwhelms any difference between business-as-usual and smart-growth development patterns as a driver of watershed-scale hydrology.

First application of the Hestia bottom-up FFCO₂ framework outside Indianapolis — producing building- and street-segment-scale fossil fuel CO₂ estimates for Salt Lake County across eight sectors at hourly resolution, then using that data product to show that household income, population, building age, and household size explain residential emissions heterogeneity, and that primary versus secondary road type predicts onroad emissions density versus intensity.