Urban Planning

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.

Parcel-level conservation prioritization and gap analysis for the Jordan River Commission, producing a geodatabase of all Salt Lake County parcels within a 1-mile corridor coded by open-space zoning, conservation easement, and public ownership status — subsequently adopted by three stakeholder organizations for land acquisition planning and regulatory decision-making.

Proof-of-concept habitat connectivity analysis for the Mid-America Regional Council using the Kansas City NRI II land cover product, modeling functional patch networks and importance rankings for Western painted turtle and Eastern meadowlark — finding that highway infrastructure has fragmented turtle connectivity in the urbanizing suburban fringe, while meadowlark habitat forms a distinctive ring around the conurbation where total area, not connectivity, is the binding constraint.