REU Site: Inclusive Student Training in Rapidly Urbanizing Climate-sensitive Terrains (InSTRUCT)

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As projected by the Fourth National Climate Assessment in 2018 for the Texas region, “As major metropolitan areas … continue their rapid population growth, overall exposure to extreme rainfall events (and droughts) will increase." A key challenge is to plan for the resilience of urban populations in the face of these challenges, in a region already prone to such weather extremes. Meeting this challenge requires an inclusive conversation that engages students from diverse backgrounds with culturally relevant material, and also incorporates multidisciplinary approaches that intertwine geosciences, hydrology, climate science, ecology, and civil engineering with fields addressing human impacts such as environmental policy, planning, and sustainability. Within our student research training program, we will analyze the processes, feedbacks, and impacts that affect our quality of life, ranging from human health, to ecosystem services, to degradation of resources. We will place new emphases on: 1) building an inclusive program by recruiting students from groups underrepresented in STEM majors and the STEM workforce, 2) integrating a diverse mentor team with respect to gender, race, culture, research, and career-stage, and 3) embracing an interdisciplinary, synergistic set of research themes, involving mentors from six different schools and disciplines within the university: natural sciences, geosciences, engineering, architecture, government, and public affairs. We thus propose to develop the REU Site on InSTRUCT: Inclusive Student Training in Rapidly Urbanizing Climate-sensitive Terrains.Most of the research projects will be focused on the central Texas region, which is a climatological and demographic hotspot. We will organize our research themes around the key connections between the integrated natural, social, and engineered subsystems. Whereas an individual student research project will emphasize one subsystem, students will gain an appreciation of all three subsystems as guided by program elements such as research roundtables, co-mentoring, and peer shadowing. Research will be organized around three interdisciplinary themes. Research Theme A will focus on engineered-natural subsystems. To understand the impacts of rapid growth of urban populations and the associated built environment, we require models of urban expansion that integrate changing urban form, climate, and ecosystems, and the resulting demands for water and other resources. Research Theme B will focus on social-engineered subsystems. By understanding individual and organizational preferences, limitations, and behaviors—along with pressures placed on them by environmental factors—we can better understand how individuals and organizations within social-engineered systems alleviate or exacerbate key interactions between the subsystems. Research Theme C will focus on past perspectives on sustainability. Studies of past societies, ecosystems and climate and hydrologic systems offer unique perspectives on present and future change that can inform planning for sustainable urban systems. Students will apply a range of methodologies to these research themes, including computational modeling of climate, hydrology, and infrastructure projections, natural geochemical tracers of water quality impacts, and survey research on equitable distribution of environmental resources. Project design will consider that the short 10-week length of the experience does not compromise the research tenets of project design, hypothesis framing, method selection, assessment of data quality, data interpretation and communication of results.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.