Our urban laboratory, the Phoenix metropolitan area, is an extremely hot and arid desert city with a burgeoning population now over four million and growing. Water is our most limited resource. How can we accommodate further population growth and still maintain a water supply adequate in quantity and quality for human use? The solutions we discover will be applicable to the many urban areas around the globe where demand for water exceeds supply.
Decision Center for a Desert City
This Center studies the decision processes used to plan and manage water resources and urbanization.
Arizona Water Institute
The Water Institute builds economic opportunity in Arizona by improving access to water information, assisting communities and local governments with technology transfer, and helping water-related industries.
Arizona Hydrological Information System
This project is developing the information infrastructure needed to access data on water-related research, technology, planning, education, and outreach from multiple sources in the Southwest.
Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER)
Through interdisciplinary projects integrating natural sciences, social science, and engineering, CAP LTER examines the effects of urbanization on a desert ecosystem and vice versa.
Sustainability Partnership
The Sustainability Partnership engages local and state policy-makers, resource managers, and industry leaders in planning for sustainable urban growth, social and economic development, resource management, and environmental protection.
Decision Theater
The Decision Theater is an immersive, interactive, 3D-visualization facility for collaborative decision making.
Urbanization and Global Environmental Change
This collaborative project is building greater knowledge and understanding of the bidirectional interactions between global environmental change and cities, present at local, regional, and global scales, and integrating the work of decision makers, practitioners, and academic researchers.
Greater Phoenix 2100
GP2100 is a network of ASU and community researchers dedicated to using knowledge to create better lives for future generations.
Integrated Analysis of Robustness in Dynamic Social Ecological Systems
This project asks: "Why are some socioecological systems more successful in navigating environmental disturbances and change than others?"
Legacies on the Landscape: Prehistoric Human Land Use and Long-Term Ecological Change
This collaborative project involving ecologists and archaeologists explores how prehistoric agricultural communities have affected plant communities, soil properties, and biogeochemical cycling for thousands of years.
Long-Term Coupled Socioecological Change in the American Southwest and Northern Mexico
In this project, archaeologists, mathematical modelers, ecologists, and environmental scientists are applying archaeological and ecological analyses, resilience theory, and formal dynamical modeling to identify variables that foster stability and promote transformation in coupled socioecological systems.
