Minutes

UCIME Group Meeting

January 20, 1999

A. Introduction of team members:

  1. Tim Robinson: PhD in Bren who just started in September, MA received from UCSB Geography in 1993, will be helping Keith out in managing the project and taking on a scientific element of the project. Research interests are the integration of watershed management and urban growth models.
  2. Noah Goldstein: third year master’s student in Geography working with Frank Davis on Biogeography and will be working with Keith for his PhD in complex systems in urban growth.
  3. Helen Couclelis: senior faculty member in Geography and Co-PI on the project. Has been a professor in Geography since 1982. Prior she was an urban planner in Greece and before that was a licensed Architect.
  4. Jeannette Candau: BA in Geography from UCSB and now working on her MA/PhD with Keith here. Her interests and project involvement are in modeling urban dynamics. For this project she is employed by the USGS through Menlo Park.
  5. Xiaohang Liu: Geochemist educated in China but has branched out to get masters degrees in Geography and Computer Science at Rutgers University. Now she is working on her PhD in decision making with artificial intelligence.
  6. Keith Clarke: Introduction not necessary but his focus is writing proposals and answering e-mail (thanks Keith for doing that!).

B. Update Reports from each team member:

  1. Jeannette: Santa Barbara application and model implementation is finished. Calibrations were done. It will run predictions with voluntary urban growth boundaries (exclusion areas). Visualization is now finished as of yesterday. She worked with Ryan Aubry (web manager working with Keith) to get it into a web format on line. Ryan did the parcel map for the South Coast Region (Ellwood to Camino Cielo and through Carpinteria). This database includes land parcels, building footprints and tree location for the study area. The data is not available to the public yet, but coming soon. Her efforts as well as Ryan’s will assist planners in looking at future urban growth for the area. There will be a news conference for its public debut soon.

Background history regarding the Urban Growth Model:

Her master’s topic addresses temporal sensitivity of the urban growth model looking at the Santa Barbara data from 1943 to the present (1997). How will the model predict the present with more or less data layers and temporal data points? Points to be looked at are where to start the study (year) and the density and spacing of the data points.

She is working at the USGS with Rich Bergstrom trying to integrate more science into their decision making strategies, specifically looking at geographic, geologic and economic data to look at environmental risks causing economic lose (example – damages in Santa Cruz area from seismic activities). It is an integrated modeling problem.

  1. Xiaohang: She has been reviewing research papers on model calibration and validation. The end goal here is a published paper and maybe to motivate a subsequent project that will implement her findings in the present modeling effort.
  2. Tim: He is getting up to speed on the project, given that he just started. First task is to set up a regular meeting time for the research team. Second, to make a Gantt Chart that will graphically illustrate the project time lines, involvement of team members and schedule of deliverables (papers, databases, code, meetings, etc) for the UCIME project. We might do a second chart for all other projects that relate to the UCIME project, just to get a handle on the global picture and that will be for internal use only. Once oriented he will then identify areas of interest in the project where he can get involved on a scientific level and hopefully relate these topics to his own dissertation work.
  3. Noah: Has been working on the project’s web page. Although the Geography Department server is down at the moment, you can link to the page through Keith’s home page. He made the exclusion area layers in conjunction with Jeannette’s efforts and worked on the documentation for that project that will play an important role once the project results go public here soon. He also has been reading up on complex systems in urban growth (particularly road networks) as he wants to look at: 1) links with Zipf size relations, 2) Central Place Theory and 3) links with urban density (Paul Sutton), urban forms, transportation, population density and urbanization size. He also is investigating ways to tie in vegetation type with the urban grown model and possibly fire history and probability.
  4. Helen and Keith: We ran out of time and will hear their contributions first off at the next meeting.

 

*** Important Dates and Announcements:

  1. Dan Sui will be coming over the summer to do a sabbatical here at UCSB.
  2. Stakeholders meetings at UCSB (Jeannette coordinating with assistance from Tim): March 14-15 for the USGS team and March 16-17 for UCIME and Steen’s group.
  3. UCIME Team Meetings will be the third Thursday of every month at 8:30 am in Keith’s office. There will be one exception as we will need to meet on Thursday March 9th just prior to the stakeholders meetings mentioned above to get organized for the events.
  4. Deadline for proposals (papers and posters for the Banff conference is January 29. The conference is scheduled for September 2-8 of 2000.