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\"Water scarcity, urban population growth, and deteriorating infrastructure impact water security around the globe. As California wrestles with the most significant drought in its recorded history, struggling to secure reliable water supplies for the future, it faces all of these crises. The story of California water, its history and its future, includes cautions and solutions for any region seeking to manage water among the pressures of a dynamic society and environment. Written by leading policy makers, lawyers, economists, hydrologists, ecologists, engineers and planners, Sustainable Water reaches across disciplines, uncovering connections and intersections. The solutions and provocations put forward in this book integrate water management strategies to increase resilience in a changing world\"--Provided by publisher.

To analyze types and patterns of greening trends across a city, this study seeks to identify a method of creating very high-resolution urban vegetation maps that scales over space and time. Vegetation poses unique challenges for image segmentation because it is patchy, has ragged boundaries, and high in-class heterogeneity. Existing and emerging public datasets with the spatial resolution necessary to identify granular urban vegetation lack a depth of affordable and accessible labeled training data, making unsupervised segmentation desirable. This study evaluates three unsupervised methods of segmenting urban vegetation: clustering with k-means using k-means++ seeding; clustering with a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM); and an unsupervised, backpropagating convolutional neural network (CNN) with simple iterative linear clustering superpixels. When benchmarked against internal validity metrics and hand-coded data, k-means is more accurate than GMM and CNN in segmenting urban vegetation. K-means is not able to differentiate between water and shadows, however, and when this segment is important GMM is best for probabilistically identifying secondary land cover class membership. Though we find the unsupervised CNN shows high degrees of accuracy on built urban landscape features, its accuracy when segmenting vegetation does not justify its complexity. Despite limitations, for segmenting urban vegetation, k-means has the highest performance, is the simplest, and is more efficient than alternatives.

Water scarcity, urban population growth, and deteriorating infrastructure are impacting water security around the globe. Struggling with the most significant drought in its recorded history, California faces all of these challenges to secure reliable water supplies for the future. The unfolding story of California water includes warnings and solutions for any region seeking to manage water among the pressures of a dynamic society and environment.Written by leading policy makers, lawyers, economists, hydrologists, ecologists, engineers, and planners, Sustainable Water reaches across disciplines to address problems and solutions for the sustainable use of water in urban areas. The solutions and ideas put forward in this book integrate water management strategies to increase resilience in a changing world.Contributors: John T. Andrew, Carolina Balazs, Celeste Cantú, Juliet Christian-Smith, Matthew Deitch, Caitlin Dyckman, Howard Foster, Julian Fulton, Peter Gleick, Brian E. Gray, Ellen Hanak, Maurice Hall, Michael Hanemann, Sasha Harris-Lovett, Matthew Heberger, G. Mathias Kondolf, Jay Lund, Damian Park, Kristen Podolak, John Radke, Isha Ray, David Sedlak, Fraser Shilling, Daniel Wendell, Robert Wilkinson, Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, Sarah Yarnell.

Water scarcity, urban population growth, and deteriorating infrastructure are impacting water security around the globe. Struggling with the most significant drought in its recorded history, California faces all of these challenges to secure reliable water supplies for the future. The unfolding story of California water includes warnings and solutions for any region seeking to manage water among the pressures of a dynamic society and environment.Written by leading policy makers, lawyers, economists, hydrologists, ecologists, engineers, and planners, Sustainable Water reaches across disciplines

Alongside global climate change, many freshwater ecosystems are experiencing substantial shifts in the concentrations and compositions of salt ions coming from both land and sea. We synthesize a risk framework for anticipating how climate change and increasing salt pollution coming from both land and saltwater intrusion will trigger chain reactions extending from headwaters to tidal waters. Salt ions trigger ‘chain reactions,’ where chemical products from one biogeochemical reaction influence subsequent reactions and ecosystem responses. Different chain reactions impact drinking water quality, ecosystems, infrastructure, and energy and food production. Risk factors for chain reactions include shifts in salinity sources due to global climate change and amplification of salinity pulses due to the interaction of precipitation variability and human activities. Depending on climate and other factors, salt retention can range from 2 to 90% across watersheds globally. Salt retained in ecosystems interacts with many global biogeochemical cycles along flowpaths and contributes to ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ chain reactions associated with temporary acidification and long-term alkalinization of freshwaters, impacts on nutrient cycling, CO 2 , CH 4 , N 2 O, and greenhouse gases, corrosion, fouling, and scaling of infrastructure, deoxygenation, and contaminant mobilization along the freshwater-marine continuum. Salt also impacts the carbon cycle and the quantity and quality of organic matter transported from headwaters to coasts. We identify the double impact of salt pollution from land and saltwater intrusion on a wide range of ecosystem services. Our salinization risk framework is based on analyses of: (1) increasing temporal trends in salinization of tributaries and tidal freshwaters of the Chesapeake Bay and freshening of the Chesapeake Bay mainstem over 40 years due to changes in streamflow, sea level rise, and watershed salt pollution; (2) increasing long-term trends in concentrations and loads of major ions in rivers along the Eastern U.S. and increased riverine exports of major ions to coastal waters sometimes over 100-fold greater than forest reference conditions; (3) varying salt ion concentration-discharge relationships at U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) sites across the U.S.; (4) empirical relationships between specific conductance and Na + , Cl − , SO 4 2− , Ca 2+ , Mg 2+ , K + , and N at USGS sites across the U.S.; (5) changes in relationships between concentrations of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and different salt ions at USGS sites across the U.S.; and (6) original salinization experiments demonstrating changes in organic matter composition, mobilization of nutrients and metals, acidification and alkalinization, changes in oxidation–reduction potentials, and deoxygenation in non-tidal and tidal waters. The interaction of human activities and climate change is altering sources, transport, storage, and reactivity of salt ions and chain reactions along the entire freshwater-marine continuum. Our salinization risk framework helps anticipate, prevent, and manage the growing double impact of salt ions from both land and sea on drinking water, human health, ecosystems, aquatic life, infrastructure, agriculture, and energy production.

Developmental education is a subject of increasing interest, and many current educational reforms are aimed at helping developmental students to succeed. As such, outcomes for developmental students are important for evaluating programs and supports offered to students in this situation. One such support is learning strategies coursework. Prior research has supported the efficacy of these courses (Boylan et al., 1997; Goldrick-Rab, 2010; Kolenovic et al., 2013; Rutschow & Schneider, 2011), so at the institution of study, one such course was offered to developmental students for free as a means to help developmental students navigate the transition to credit-bearing courses. For this study, GPA, retention, and persistence were obtained in order to evaluate the impact of this course on students. For students who took the scholarship as opposed to students who did not, retention (reenrollment the subsequent semester) and persistence (reenrollment, transfer, or graduation) were higher for students who took the course as opposed to those who did not when matching on demographic characteristics and prior GPA. As motivational traits are correlated with GPA (Almalki, 2019; Fong et al., 2021), persistence and retention as well, the results from the LASSI, a study skills inventory that measures skill, will and self-regulation, were evaluated to determine if there was correlation. As a result of the course, outcomes in attitude, concentration, motivation, test strategies and time management were all increased from pre to post-test, and all scores except attitude, concentration and test strategies post-test scores were correlated with higher GPA. Concentration, motivation and test strategies post-test scores were correlated with higher persistence, and no scores correlated with retention alone. Finally, as some research indicates that developmental students are more at risk in online learning (Jaggers & Xu, 2010; Xu & Jaggers, 2013), it is important to evaluate if online coursework disadvantages our developmental students. Students who take the learning strategies course face to face do have better grades overall, but do not have a significantly higher GPA or persistence and retention rate. Overall, we can recommend that coursework for developmental students has the potential to increase retention and persistence, that effort should be expended on increasing those motivational characteristics and that we should continue to offer the coursework both online and in person with that caveat that grades may be higher in face-to-face coursework.

California is confronting its largest drought in recorded history, which may signal the onset of a megadrought. An executive order mandates reduction in residential water consumption. At the same time, the state's population continues to grow. Reducing residential outdoor water use is a critical management objective to adapt to scarce water resources. This dissertation asks, to what degree can land planning contribute to outdoor water demand management? Can principles of compact development and strategic growth mitigate use? First, the dissertation reviews the literature of water demand models that incorporate landscape variables, thematically characterizing the variables and examining model spatiotemporal resolution. Next, the dissertation examines methods of quantitatively characterizing the urban environment using land cover, weather, and landform variables. It develops variables by parcel, and then defines microclimate zones of similar parcels by clustering on each parcel's microclimate signature. In the fourth chapter, it examines the contributions of landscape and microclimate to household water consumption in the East Bay Municipal Utility District of California. It evaluates 26 million observations of monthly water use data from 2005-2011 recorded at over 300,000 single family residences. It analyzes the data as a whole, and then subsets the full population by quantile of water user and by microclimate zone. Results reveal heterogeneous water demand profiles, but all models indicate that landscape type and the presence of a pool are important predictors of consumption. Less important are lot size and microclimate variables. With both high and low water users spatially distributed throughout the study area and across microclimate zones, there is evidence that many different development styles in many different locations can be water efficient.

South Florida's Everglades is home to 67 threatened and endangered species. By 2100 it is estimated that sea level rise will inundate over 20% of existing conservation lands. Species will be dislocated and migrate to new land. Simultaneously, more than 500,000 people are moving to the region annually. The new populations are subdividing and developing rural lands. By 2100, it is estimated that over 60% of rural land will be urbanized. In this thesis, I use Geographic Information Systems to project the location of urban land, conservation land and inundated land in South Florida over the next 50 years. I assess fee simple purchase and conservation easements as potential methods of conveying land protection. I conclude that none of the current methods of conservation have the capacity to manage the large scale land protection that will be critical in the coming years, if we are to protect our species from the emergent and significant stressors of climate change and urbanization. I conclude that a major federal initiative based on purchasing deed restrictions and a new agency that specializes in monitoring will be necessary to quickly creating a large, adaptive ecological reserve network.