SETx-IFL: Equitable Solutions for Communities Caught between Floods and Air Pollution

Our Urban Integrated Field Lab has the goal of addressing the following questions: Which processes and variables need to be captured in regional scale hydrological and atmospheric models so that they are representative of the conditions experienced by local communities and help inform adaptation strategies?  And how can we understand the linkages between and within natural, built, and social systems in urbanized regions to better support natural and human resilience? Our Urban IFL (SETx-IFL) is located in Southeast Texas, specifically the Beaumont-Port Arthur region . This urban area represents the climate adaptation needs, population diversity and vulnerability, and ecological richness that characterize many urban centers along the Gulf Coast. Beaumont has experienced continued urban expansion and increased impervious cover over the past several decades; these changes have likely led to increased urban heat island effect and reduced capacity to absorb rainwater, exacerbating existing climate risk. In addition, the Beaumont, Port Arthur area is home to one of the nation's largest petrochemical industrial complexes, which make it more vulnerable to climate-induced disasters capable of significant air toxics releases, in addition to chronic air toxic exposures that can raise the risk of cancer and other adverse health outcomes. The long-term goals for this SETx-IFL are to provide quantitative understanding of projected climate change impacts across SETx-IFL in a way that is generalizable to other regions and improve the practice of resilience science and community resilience through new and generalizable theories of change validated in SETx-IFL. To achieve these goals, this SETx-IFL coordinates numerous disciplines, scholars, and community stakeholders toward the short-term goals of a) integrating new data, methods, and models about the interactions among natural, human-built, and social systems; b) increasing our understanding of interdependencies, mutual benefits, and trade-offs of different wellbeing outcomes for humans and the environment; c) co-producing knowledge with stakeholders; and d) centering concepts of social equity in urbanized regions across spatial and temporal scales.  

Funding: DOE

Collaborators: Lamar University, Oak Ridge National Lab, Prairie View A&M, and Texas A&M

News coverage: Inside Climate News, Bridging Barriers, The University of Texas at Austin

How do rivers interact with their floodplains?

River-floodplain connectivity controls the transport of water, solutes, and solids through fluvial systems, thus impacting the functioning of rivers, storage of carbon on floodplains, floodplain sedimentation, and ecosystem functioning. Floodplain complexity is visible and detectable from lidar data; quantifying how and at what scale this complexity affects connectivity mechanisms is key to improving our understanding of river-floodplain processes. We combine an extensive collection of field observations, lidar data sets, numerical modeling, and advanced tools for feature extraction and analysis, to quantify river-floodplain connectivity of the Trinity River, TX. We are also studying river-floodplain connectivity in the Rio Grande River, TX, and its implications for agriculture. 

Funding: National Science Foundation

Collaborators: David Mohrig (Jackson School of Geosciences)

Students: Nelson Tull

How do networks (rivers, roads, people...) interact during floods and other hazards?

In planning and emergency situations, river networks and governance networks interact: people interact with the environment and the environment responds to community’s modifications. Particularly during and in response to emergencies, when interactions can be fast and overlapping, they can affect a community’s safety and its capability of recovering from damage. Mechanisms by which this complex system of interacting networks functions during an emergency, in fact, control our ability to respond to natural events and recover from them (be resilient). However, knowledge of interacting networks is at its infancy, predominantly due to the lack of data and mathematical approaches to analyze such complex systems and to gaps in knowledge about human behavior and socio-cultural differences. In this project we model and explore these interactions by developing a so-called multiplex framework for the analysis of interacting networks of natural/hydrological and social systems in risk governance (planning and preparation) and during emergency response for floods and other hazards.

Funding: Planet Texas 2050

Collaborators: Patrick Bixler (LBJ School of Public Affairs and Community and Regional Planning)

Student: Matt Preisser

Can we model the subsurface from surface network information?

Surface connections, such as those among channels in river networks, are important for understanding the development and evolution of landscapes, such as densely populated coastal river deltas. Connections in the subsurface are critical in understanding groundwater flow and solute transport. Preferential flowpaths, in fact, can quickly deliver contaminants to water supply wells, a particularly important problem in densely populated coastal areas. Establishing a quantitative link between surface and subsurface patterns will greatly advance our capability to predict the movement of contaminants in groundwater, thus improving access to clean water and limiting pollution and health risks. We propose to investigate quantitatively how the dynamics of surface networks create subsurface networks, and thus determine how surface information can be used to predict properties of the subsurface. This will enable us to better predict sustainability and manage water resources in densely populated deltas such as the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta, where high concentrations of arsenic are widespread in the groundwater of the upper delta, and salinity problems are pervasive in the lower delta. 

Funding: National Science Foundation (2017-2022)

Collaborators: Jay Hariharan, U. Delaware: Holly Michael and Tymon Xu;  U. Minnesota: Chris Paola, Austin Chadwick; Queen's University: Elisabeth Steel

The Delta Connectome: Structure and Transport Dynamics of Delta Networks across Scales and Disciplines

Human-induced activities and climatic shifts are significantly impacting deltas around the world. A quantitative description of the form and structure of deltas and their dynamics is fundamental to address how they react to changes in climatic forces and human pressure. As part of this project, we are creating a research/educational framework, the Delta Connectome, based on the general idea of a delta as a directed network of connected paths (physical, functional, and conceptual paths of process coupling) which interact continuously at a broad range of space and time scales and dictate system response to change. Specific goals of this project are (i) the objective quantification of delta morphologic features (channel and island properties) to identify the signature of vegetation, anthropogenic disturbance, and processes responsible for delta formation and evolution; (ii) the development of an automatic image processing-based tool for the extraction of relevant information from remotely sensed data in order to apply the analysis in (i) to a wide range of delta morphologies; (iii) the identification of the environmental controls on channel network and shoreline dynamics through coupled analysis of the extracted features through time and time series of environmental forcings; (iv) the quantification of strength, directionality, statistical significance, and scale of couplings among key variables and the effect of anthropogenic disturbance and change on such couplings.

Funding: National Science Foundation  (2014-2020)