Undergoing Research Activities

The goal of these Undergoing Research Activities

  1. Analyzing the dynamics of neighborhood change as they relate to income disparities. Ultimately, these dynamics will be linked to the spatial relationships between income and elevation to understand the demographic and economic consequences of future sea level rise.
  2. LIDAR data and USGS groundwater data, can be combined with canal elevation to produce a difference map, which could then be used to create a water table map.
  3. How socio-economic characteristics influence and respond to changes in residential landscapes following hurricane disturbance.

Other undergoing research activities include producing spatial models of land use decision-making, which have gained a new level of complexity as South Florida moves closer to a realization that climate change induced sea level rise (SLR) must be accounted for in land use planning. This working group has examined the situation in three contexts:

1) "participant observation" done by group researcher Hugh Gladwin who is an appointee to the Miami-Dade County Climate Change Advisory Task Force [MDCCATF]. In its three years the task force has grappled with issues of climate change evidence, SLR rise thresholds, and adaptive land use change planning. This has given Gladwin a perspective on impact contributions our project can make to the climate change planning process, 2) Our working group has been involved in collaborative efforts with the USGS and urban planners at Florida Atlantic University to develop tools for spatial mapping of quality of life indicators.  These indicators include nearness to transit and green space, neighborhood housing cost burden, hurricane storm surge risk, and other empirical measures. This work will add "push and pull" indicators to other spatial measures of land use now being studied by the HD group, and hurricane storm surge affects many of the same low elevation areas that will be subject to SLR. Continuing research by collaborators on risk perceptions and vulnerability/resilience in these areas add to knowledge of processes that will be important in SLR adaptation.