Cooperative Agreement for CESU-affiliated University with Rocky Mountain Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit

The USGS is offering a funding opportunity to a CESU partner for research on resolving the uncertainty behind relationships between urban land covers and exposure to urban environmental hazards, such as extreme heat and poor air quality at the human-interaction scale.   Urban exposure to extreme heat and poor air quality is linked to heightened morbidity and loss in wages. Moreover, these negative effects are hypothesized to be unequally distributed across income and racial groups. However, these linkages are often interpolated at larger scales, using satellite imagery, or decennial U.S. census demographic data, and there are very few datasets that capture land cover, urban microclimate, and direct effects on human behavior. With the rise of available high-resolution urban land cover data, along with the growing availability of low-cost microclimate sensor technology, projects can be designed to remove uncertainty in how land cover influences microclimate, how urban microclimate influences human behaviors, and whether those influences are stratified across demographic groups.