Sustainability Research

Sustainability Research Forum

Upcoming Presentations:

 

An Opportunity to Share Your Research - this year the Center for Sustainable Processes and Practices is hosting a series of informal seminars/brownbag sessions to showcase PSU's sustainability research activities and to provide a forum for PSU faculty to share their "research-in-progress" with their colleagues. Please let us know if you have sustainability-related research that you are working on and would like to share. Perhaps you have a presentation lined up at a conference or other gathering? We'd like to provide the opportunity for you to present to the PSU community as well. Or perhaps you are still in the midst of a research activity and would like to get some feedback or just share your observations to date? We'll provide the forum for you to do that. Please contact Jennifer Allen (jhallen@pdx.edu) or Elizabeth Lloyd (minor@pdx.edu) if any of these opportunities appeal to you. Thanks in advance for sharing your work with the rest of us!

 

 

  • Feedback Mechanisms in the Urban Environment: How do heat & air quality episodes and public advisories impact human behavior...and vice versa?
    Presenter: Dr. David Sailor, Associate Professor, Mechanical and Materials Engineering, Portland State University.

Date: Friday, May 9th
Time: 11:00 - 12:00pm with refreshments served afterwards
Place: Smith Center, Room 238

This presentation will start with a background into the causes, effects, and potential for mitigation of the urban heat island. It will then highlight results from an NSF-funded project that seeks to understand the feedback mechanisms in the urban environment. Specifically, this project explores the extent to which people modify their behavior in response to excessive heat, poor air quality, and public advisories... and the extent to which such behavior change can impact heat and air quality episodes through changes in emissions of pollutants and waste heat.

Dr. Sailor is an expert in urban climates and how they’re affected by buildings, energy consumption, and human activity. His research is in the general area of Energy and the Environment. In recent years the focus of his work has been on modeling the urban climate, with applications in air quality, building energy consumption, human health, and climate change. Please see his website for details of ongoing projects.

 

  • Portland Area Ecosystems: Progressive management, but we're still losing ground.
    Presenter: Dr. Alan Yeakley, Associate Professor, Environmental Science, Portland State University

Date: Friday, May 30th
Time: 10:00 - 11:00am with refreshments served afterwards
Place: Smith Center, Room 238

In research conducted with Connie Ozawa (USP), we examined losses of riparian ecosystems in several Portland metro area cities over a 12 year period of growth, and found continuing losses of these important land-based natural resources. This seminar will discuss the ecological changes in riparian ecosystems in Portland area cities experiencing population growth, and the relative effectiveness of varying municipal efforts to manage riparian ecosystems.

Dr. Yeakley's research is in the general area of Environmental Systems. His focus is in the major fields of ecological system analysis, ecosystem management, forest ecology, hydrological modeling, riparian ecology, urban ecology, watershed biogeochemistry, and watershed hydrology. Please visit his website for more information.