A new study published in Restoration Ecology by researchers from Arizona State University’s Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science found evidence that particulate organic carbon levels are one of the most important factors in determining coral outplant survival. Author Greg Asner is a sustainability scientist and center director.

This new finding suggests that potential coral outplanting sites should be selected in areas where sedimentation levels are low, away from coastal development, or where coastal development is carefully managed for reef conservation.

“New restoration protocols can use remotely sensed data of multiple oceanographic variables to assess the environmental history of a site. This will help evaluate and optimize site selection and give their outplants the best chance of survival,” said Shawna Foo, lead author and postdoctoral researcher at the ASU center.

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New for 2021, the foundation's updated application guidelines for research grants on reducing inequality and research grants on improving the use of research evidence provide details about eligibility, selection criteria, and application requirements, as well as tips from our program officers and summaries of recent awards.

2021 application deadlines:

• January 13, 2021, 3PM EST
• May 5, 2021, 3PM EST
• August 4, 2021, 3PM EST

A historic temperature visualization developed by Arizona State University's Knowledge Exchange for Resilience is a tool that shows shifts in temperatures using an interactive heat map and bar graph. It includes historical Arizona temperatures from the 1890s to the present.

"The raw data from the Arizona State Climate Office features 130,000 traces of daily temperature data spanning across three cities over 130 years. It was challenging to transform such an extensive data set into a useful visualization,” said the lead scientist for the tool, Assistant Research Professor Sarbeswar Praharaj, PhD with the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience.

The warm and cool color palette highlights the degree of temperature changes from the baseline number. The data is organized by month, which shows changes over a calendar year and allows users to travel back several decades or just to last summer.

The Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Service is ASU’s strategic research and implementation partner for businesses, governments, federal agencies, and NGOs dedicated to contributing to the solutions of a more sustainable world. In collaboration with stakeholders, internal and external from the university, RMWSSS co-develops research projects with the goal of creating complex solutions for the complex problems our planet is facing.

The RMWSSS team recently wrapped up three exciting applied research projects.

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Sustainability scientists Hilairy Hartnett, Everett Shock and Ariel Anbar, with their colleagues Elizabeth Trembath-Reichert and Michael Line are co-investigators on a new NASA astrobiology program research team, one of eight in the agency's new Interdisciplinary Consortia for Astrobiology Research (ICAR) program.

Sara Walker is the principal investigator, and Hyunju Kim is deputy PI.

The team will be combining big data, novel high-throughput experiments and models to ultimately determine a way to quantify the universal properties of life and to predict what life should look like in diverse planetary environments.

Spend January 5-7, 2021 engaged in a breadth of activities designed to surface the best in emerging approaches for shaping the future of smart campuses, cities and education -- and life during and after the pandemic. Students, faculty, technologists and business leaders are invited to participate in the first-ever ShapingEDU Winter Games.

Leveraging the unique opportunity presented in these remote times, the annual Smart Region Summit is going global and will take place this year at the Winter Games through a specialized track designed by The Connective. All dreamers, doers and drivers who want to address the pressing question of what comes next are invited to register today and join us for a series of keynotes, breakouts and hackathons

Arizona State University and Devex are hosting a global hackathon. Open to universities from anywhere in the world and based on the model from the PLuS Alliance and Devils Invent, the hackathon calls on students to create solutions to five real-world development challenges aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). One winning team in each challenge category will showcase its solution at Devex World and receive opportunities to further develop their idea.

The event takes place Friday November 13, 2020 at 5PM MST through Sunday November 15, 2020 at 3:30PM MST.

Students at ASU will be competing for a slot to go up against students from around the world and will be creating solutions in 3 of the 5 areas which are related to: business transforming development, data revolution, and innovation at scale. One winning team in each challenge category will showcase its solution at Devex World and receive opportunities to further develop their idea!

Learn more and register.

Among ways being explored to combine biology and engineering to remedy a range of growing global environmental problems, algae-based solutions look especially promising.

The encouraging viewpoint stems from progress in research that is revealing how the properties of algae can be harnessed to become the driving force for a slew of productive biotechnological pursuits.

Some of the research findings have been the result of efforts based at the Arizona Center for Algae Technology and Innovation, or AzCATI, embedded in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University.

Read more at ASU Now.

The Infrastructure Misfits (un)Society and Arizona State University's Metis Center for Infrastructure and Sustainable Engineering present a three-day forum with presentations on the future of infrastructure. The event is co-sponsored by the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network.

The event, moderated by sustainability scientist Mikhail Chester, features the following presentations.

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Meaghan K. Kramer, staff attorney with Arizona Center for Disability Law, will present the third of four lectures in the School of Social Transformation's Seeking Justice in Arizona Fall Lecture Series. The talk will take place via Zoom, with livestream on YouTube, Thursday, November 12 from 10:30–11:45 a.m.

Meaghan Kramer is a staff attorney at the Arizona Center for Disability Law (ACDL), where she advocates for Arizonans who have a wide range of physical, mental, psychiatric, sensory and cognitive disabilities. Meaghan is currently targeting systemic issues affecting Arizonans with disabilities in the areas of employment, housing, healthcare, education, voting and prisons. The ACDL uses advocacy, lobbying and impact litigation to bring positive change to Arizona’s disability community.

The series, now in its 16th year, brings in experts from our local communities to discuss critical national issues in an Arizona context. Each lecture is followed by a question and answer period and time to interact with the speaker informally. Admission is free and open to the public.

A new report from OECD, Addressing societal challenges using transdisciplinary research, examines how transdisciplinary research can be used to address complex societal challenges. The report is based in large part on analysis of 28 case studies to identify the key obstacles to effectively implementing transdisciplinary research and make recommendations for best practices.

The ASU Decision Center for a Desert City is featured as one of the case studies (p. 43) and was recommended to OECD by the National Science Foundation as an exemplary project illustrating best practices. DCDC is one of only three case studies located in North America, along with projects at Texas A&M and Purdue University.

The final recommendations for universities and public research institutions reflect several ASU initiatives and principles including the ASU Charter and Design Aspirations, institutional structures such as the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory and the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation, as well as the university's graduate faculty model and corporate and strategic partnerships.

The ASU Vita is an electronic curriculum vitae builder that supports the reporting of teaching research and service activities. ASU Vita maximizes the quality of personnel data, and streamlines the collection and reporting process. ASU Vita is a product in the Academic Personnel Actions Reporting System (APARS).

To support your research and instructional efforts, the Provost's Office is requiring ASU Academic Personnel to complete your profile with three years of data by Dec. 31, 2020.

Get started with ASU Vita

The UREx SRN's Scenarios Working Group and each city team have worked tirelessly to create participatory visions of the future for each network city over the past several years. Now that we have rich databases of visions and preferred strategies for each city, the next step is to communicate and promote these visions to catalyze sustainability transitions. This is what several members of the San Juan City Team set out to do in August 2019.

For more than a year, several San Juan City Team members have been working together to design a platform to share the entire collection of scenario visions, narratives, strategies, and timelines for San Juan 2080 in a visual, engaging, and interactive tool. We also wanted to enrich this platform with background knowledge, a diversity of resources, and relevant case studies from other cities to make them more useful. For instance, to connect local stakeholders with the knowledge and financial resources to actually implement some of the strategies.

We used ArcGIS Story Maps as our platform to present these syntheses. The platform includes syntheses for each of the three flood scenarios (coastal floods, riverine floods, and urban floods) as well as the three transformative visions (Connected Municipality, Food and Energy Security, and Just and Livable City) developed during the UREx San Juan 2080 scenario workshops.

We are very excited to share the final version of this platform: Visiones de Ciudad - San Juan 2080. For those who are unfamiliar with the UREx Scenario Workshop process and/or outputs, we have created a landing page ("Inicio") that provides context for this collection of syntheses. We invite you to view the Story Map and share it with anyone who you think would be interested. Please note that it is in Spanish.

This platform is an example of one possible method for mobilizing each city's Scenario Workshop data within their communities, and it will ideally serve as an example for other UREx cities to create similar tools – increasing the knowledge uptake of the many invaluable resources co-produced by the UREx over the past five years.

This project could not have been possible without the gracious support of two NSF INTERN Supplement Awards provided to Robert Hobbins over the past year.

Primary contributors to the Visiones de Ciudad - San Juan 2080 Story Map: Robert Hobbins, Tischa Muñoz-Erickson, Pablo Méndez-Lázaro, Ariel Lugo, Juan González Moscoso, Grizelle González, Ingrid Vila Biaggi, Mandy Kuhn, Maria Maurer, and Anaís Delilah Roque. For the full list of contributors, please see the "Inicio" page and credits section of each page.

Sustainability scholar Iveta Silova, director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Global Education in ASU's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, has co-authored a background report for the UNESCO’s Futures of Education Initiative.

The 15-page paper, Learning to become with the world: education for future survival, was commissioned by UNESCO as background information to assist in drafting the Futures of Education report to be published in 2021.

The abstract follows.

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On Wednesday, October 21, 2020, 6:00-7:00 p.m. PST, ASU Center for Biodiversity Outcomes Founding Director Leah Gerber delivered a virtual talk titled “Knowledge to outcomes in global biodiversity conservation.” This talk was part of the New Mexico State University’s Climate Change Education Seminar Series.

About this talk

Global biodiversity loss is occurring at an unprecedented rate. Approximately 1 million species are threatened with extinction and many species have gone extinct in the past decade.

The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report offers an integrated overview of where the world stands in relation to key international goals, including the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Aichi Biodiversity Targets and the Paris Agreement on climate change.

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Join us Friday, October 30, for the 2nd annual (virtual) workshop on accelerating sustainable energy transitions and ethical responses to climate change. SEEK (Sustainable Energy, Education and Knowledge-Sharing) is an action research project of the Spirituality and Sustainability Initiative and catalyzes connections between social values and effective action. SEEK is led by sustainability scientist Elisabeth Graffy, professor of practice in ASU's College of Global Futures.

This year's workshop will explore four themes: practical energy stewardship and the ethics of care, the science and ethics of direct climate intervention, pathways to solar: what you need to know, and cultivating community resilience during uncertain times. Registration is free.

In his newest book, “Future Rising: A Journey From the Past to the Edge of Tomorrow,” sustainability scientist Andrew Maynard embarks on a 14-billion-year historical journey to show readers how we started and what we are steering toward.

“As humans we have a profound ability to not only imagine new futures but to change them,” says Maynard, who is associate dean for curricula and student success in ASU's College of Global Futures. “That comes with a lot of responsibility. If we are doing things intended to change the future, we have to do so smartly.” 

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Nov. 13, ASU's School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment will host a research showcase to provide a high-level overview of research expertise by their new faculty. Faculty, students and others are invited to participate in this informative discussion of new research topics being undertaken by SEBE faculty.

The event will be webcast live via Zoom on Friday, November 13, from 1:00 - 2:00 p.m. Arizona time. View the flyer to learn more about the presenters.

According to an October 22 article in the Washington Post, Tesla is forging ahead with new self-driving technology, despite skepticism among some safety advocates about whether Tesla’s technology is ready — and whether the rest of the world is ready for cars that drive themselves. Self-driving is lightly regulated in the United States, and Tesla does not need permission to launch the new feature.

Ted Pavlic, assistant professor in ASU's College of Global Futures, works with autonomous systems. Asked about whether driverless cars are truly possible, Pavlic said, "They say that it’s just around the corner, but you don’t realize that the effort to get just around the corner gets more and more and more [complicated] as you get closer to the corner."

A new study by CAP LTER sustainability scientists evaluated how Phoenix residents perceive and value urban ecological infrastructure (UEI). This research can help urban planners, landscape architects, etc., create UEI that people enjoy and that has biological value.

The authors included Jeffrey A. Brown, Kelli L. Larson, Susannah B. Lerman, Daniel L. Childers, Riley Andrade, Heather L. Bateman, Sharon J. Hall, Paige S. Warren and Abigail M. York. The paper, Influences of Environmental and Social Factors on Perceived Bio-Cultural Services and Disservices, was published October 22, 2020, in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

The abstract follows.

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