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UMBC CENTER FOR URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND EDUCATION
Impact/Purpose:
The objective of this grant was to provide start-up funding for the Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education (CUERE). The purpose of the center is to promote and integrate understanding of the environmental, social, and economic consequences of the transformation of the urban landscape through cooperative research, conferences and symposia, and support of university teaching programs.
Description:
This was a multi-year project to establish the Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education (CUERE) at UMBC. The Center was founded to advance understanding of the environmental, social and economic consequences of changes to the urban and suburban landscape.
During its first three years of operation, the Center concentrated on research and education programs in the Baltimore metropolitan region, the Baltimore-Washington corridor, the State of Maryland, and other urban areas in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. New techniques of spatial data analysis coupled with multidisciplinary research approaches to urban environmental problems that have been developed by CUERE are widely applicable to other urban areas in the U.S. and abroad. Projects that have been initiated using the EPA Star grant as core funding include: (1) Comparative Study of the Baltimore Region; (2) State of the Baltimore Region; (3) The Definition and Measurement of Urban Sprawl; (4) Revisiting Megalopolis; (5) The State of the Inner Suburbs: An Examination of Suburban Baltimore, 1980 to 2000; (6) Creating an Urban Ecosystem of Blue and Green Space in the Greater Baltimore Region; (7) Survey and Analysis of Statewide Recreational Needs; (8) Children's Environmental Health Infrastructure Study; (9) The Impact of Demographic Change and the Expansion of Urban Areas in Rural Maryland Since 1970; (10) Markets for Preserving Land in Maryland: Making TDR Program Work Better; (11) Collaborative Research on Hydrology, Hydraulics and Hydrometeorology of Flood Response in Urbanizing Drainage Basins; (12) Assessment of LIDAR for Hydraulic Modeling of Flood Hazards; (13) Using DTM and LIDAR Data to Analyze Human Induced Topographic Change in Owings Mills, MD; (14) Using an Impervious Permit Allowance System To Reduce Impervious Surface Coverage for Environmental Sustainability; (15) The Influence of Land Use and Environmental Factors on Landscape Characteristics and Dynamics in Urban Ecosystems, (16) Watershed 263; (17) Cyberinfrastructure Needs for a Model Environmental Field Facility in Baltimore, and (18) Determination of Sediment Erosion and Deposition Rates for Valley Creek in Valley Forge National Historical Park. In addition, dissemination of final results from an EPA/NSF/USDA Water and Watersheds project, “Documenting the Effects of Urban Sprawl on a Model Watershed near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania” was partially supported as an activity.