Category Archives: Peer Reviewed Article Review

pollinators in rain gardens

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This is pretty fun – researchers at Northwestern at Pitt installed cameras in rain gardens and used machine learning to analyze over 40,000 photos of pollinators visiting them. This also appears to be a successful interdisciplinary collaboration between civil and environmental engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and geology and environmental science academic departments, which I can tell you from personal experience can require overcoming surprising and substantial resistance. The article is not open access, sadly. This is why my next job may be happily cleaning toilets at a university, if it gets me gym, pool, and library access.

Continuous diurnal monitoring of pollinator activity in urban rain gardens using camera traps, unsupervised machine learning algorithms, and deep learning detection: A proof-of-concept

The effects of urbanization and climate change have resulted in a global decline in pollinators. Adaptive strategies such as green stormwater infrastructure (GSI), and rain gardens (RGs) specifically, have the potential to create habitat for pollinators in urban environments in addition to other benefits such as hydrological control. Although many studies detail the habitat provision of natural areas, few explore quantitatively the pollinator activity promoted by urban GSI and compare it to a native system. The aim of this proof-of-concept study is to demonstrate an innovative methodology to continuously track pollinator activity using camera traps and employ advanced data analytics to interrogate the videos and identify patterns in pollinator activity. We monitor pollinator activity diurnally across multiple urban RGs and pollinator gardens (PGs) in comparison to a restored prairie using 10 trail cameras with motion detection and IR spectra technology over a month (July 2023). We compare the pollinator activity at patches of a high Coefficient of Conservatism (C-value) native species (Echinacea purpurea; Asteracaeae) to that of a lower C-value native species (Asclepias syriaca; Apocynaceae). Data analysis including use of an unsupervised machine learning algorithm, suggest that RGs located near PGs with high C-value and high-density plant assemblages can promote orders of magnitude greater pollinator activity than isolated systems, or even, a restored prairie. Once acquired, field images were labeled for deep learning model detection. We trained a YOLOv8n model with 42,271 images over a course of 5 runs to detect pollinator classes. These results support the findings that urban landscapes can provide habitats to support biodiversity and offer valuable insights into design strategies that can potentially boost the pollination services of small, patchy GSI systems such as urban RGs when they are located with connectivity and in proximity to PGs. Finally, our trained YOLOv8n model ran with a total precision of 90%, total recall of 79%, and a total maP50 of 85% providing an accurate methodology and foundation to efficiently interrogate and quantify pollinator activity in the field.

What is good for the aging brain?

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What is good for the aging brain? First, reading. Is this really a surprise? There is some suggestion that reading about people in social situations might help substitute for being in actual social situations. Introverts rejoice! But there is also some suggestion of book clubs. Ugh…what I don’t like about book clubs is the idea that I am going to waste my remaining mortal reading time on suboptimal choices that other people think are good for me to read. Maybe online book clubs help solve this problem, because somewhere in the world’s billions there are probably at least thousands or even millions who want to read the things I want to read. But the idea of engaging with strangers on a screen is less appealing than a small group of friends or at least acquaintances discussing something. I like the idea, really – how about just reading something shorter than a book? I am not a huge short story fan, but maybe this is the happy medium. I can sit down and do my “homework” the night before or morning of book club. One more random thought – I wonder about audiobooks vs. reading on a page or screen. I enjoy both, but I actually find that both take regular practice at staying focused, and if I get out of practice with one or the other it takes some effort to get back into the swing of it. If you lose focus while reading words on a page, it’s easy to pause or backtrack, while if your mind wanders during an audiobook, it’s more annoying to rewind and try to figure out where you went wrong. I kind of like podcasts for this reason, because if I lose focus or doze off I don’t really care about going back. I’ll admit I also pay more attention to something I have paid money for than something I have not. Trying to concentrate and process the spoken word may very well be a useful cognitive exercise though, so when I say “annoying” that translates to “effort” which is the thing you have to do to improve or at least maintain yourself.

“Physical activity” – well, we knew that – but also “engagement with arts and culture“. Now that sounds kind of nice, but again I want to pick my arts and culture and not just ones that other people engage in to show off. I wonder if people have separated music from other arts, which could engage the brain differently. Music is inherently mathematical, it requires you to connect your senses and your brain in a unique way, and it is also creative, especially if you are making or writing it yourself. Really concentrating on music takes effort, similar to an audiobook, but you also just let it wash over you in the background without making the effort. Engaging in music with others might have different benefits than doing it by yourself. Damaging your eardrums with excessively loud music is almost certainly not good for your brain.

sea level rise projections

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A new data set aggregates sea level rise projections, of which there have been many.

Evolution of Global Sea-Level Rise Projections and Their Uncertainty

Recognizing this challenge, Garner et al. (2018)—hereafter, G18—developed a database of 21st century GMSL projections (A. J. Garner et al., 2018). An analysis of the G18 database generated several findings, including that the range of 21st century GMSL projections has varied greatly over time, despite central estimates being relatively consistent (A. J. Garner et al., 2018), and that upper estimates of GMSL rise from individual studies often exceeded upper bounds provided in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments (A. J. Garner et al., 2018).

Eight years have elapsed since the publication of the G18 database and analysis, during which two additional IPCC reports incorporating new GMSL projections have been published (Fox-Kemper et al., 2021; Oppenheimer et al., 2019). To accommodate these new reports and other scientific developments and individual studies (e.g., Bamber et al., 2019; Brown et al., 2021; Grandey et al., 2024; Hamlington et al., 2024; Horton et al., 2020; Palmer et al., 2024; Weeks et al., 2025), we have updated and expanded the original G18 database of 21st century GMSL projections. The updated database (hereafter, G26 database) includes GMSL projections published through 31 December 2025 for a wide variety of time horizons—including decadal projections with end years throughout the 21st century, as well as longer term, multi-century projections. Other updates to the database include the addition of new fields, such as the country of origin for each GMSL projection study. These updates allow the assessment of the ways in which sea level science has evolved in recent years, but also to perform new analyses that offer additional insights into the history of the science, providing vital context for researchers and decision makers as they contend with challenges presented by the numerous studies and methodological choices in a deeply uncertain field.

Urban greening roundup

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I have a bunch of urban planning, urban greening, landscape architecture and engineering journals in my RSS feed. Sometimes a lot of time goes by in between articles that I find interesting. But today an interesting cluster popped up, so here are a handful of highlights. The words below are my musings, not necessarily a summary of the papers. Click through if you are interested.

  • From Landscape and Urban Planning, Intensifying drought threatens the heat-regulating capacity of urban vegetation: Trees, parks, and soil cool cities through both shade and evapotranspiration. But for evapotranspiration to work and for the vegetation to persist long-term, there has to be water. There are going to be some areas where there is not enough water in an absolute sense, and others where there is enough water in a year-round water balance sense, but it is not stored during wet periods and provided to the vegetation during the dry periods in between the wet periods. Then there will be some lucky areas that are both hot and have plenty of water most of the time, although even there you may have an infrequent drought severe enough to kill vegetation without irrigation.
  • From Earth’s Future, Urban Landscape Irrigation and the Future of Sustainable Cities: Compared to agriculture, irrigation in urban areas is very ad hoc and not very scientific. Beyond that, and I don’t know whether this article gets into it, a lot of irrigation is done with drinking water. In an ideal world, you would capture every drop of rainfall and use it for something useful. You would deliver and use drinkable water in homes and businesses as efficiently as practical, and treat the resulting wastewater only to the state necessary to use it for irrigation. Then you would theoretically irrigate only at the rate of evaporation. All this requires a level of plumbing and real-time control implemented in a million decentralized locations with different owners/stakeholders and different types of land use. Maybe some sort of positronic brain could help, but it’s a heavy lift in the near-term.
  • From Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, Assessing patterns and gaps in recent urban nature and biodiversity planning across 25 European cities: The European Union has taken a heavy-handed regulatory approach as it tends to do, requiring urban areas to develop and submit “Urban Nature Plans” for approval. This appeals to me as a proponent of both planning and managing urban ecosystem service provision. I like the idea of weaving green infrastructure planning into the bigger picture of urban infrastructure planning, then tying public infrastructure funding to implementation of projects that are consistent with the plan, particularly in times when private-sector growth slows down and there is a consensus that government economic stimulus is needed. This is all rational, evidence-based, and non-partisan in my mind. I also recognize it is nowhere near politically viable in the near term in the United States or oh-so-practical developed Asia, let alone developing countries.
  • From Trends in Ecology and Evolution, The carbon cost of forest fragmentation: Size matters: In my fantasy world of rational policies and plans, we can start thinking both about total habitat and habitat connectivity within and across cities. Here is some evidence that connectivity has a multiplier effect on carbon sequestration that goes beyond just size. It makes sense, if vegetation around the edges of habitat tends to be more stressed and less productive. Of course, there is a longstanding debate about the relationship between productivity, and biodiversity or habitat quality. An algae bloom or a hillside covered in kudzu is pretty productive, for example, and the opposite of biodiverse.
  • From Ecological Engineering, Assessing the role of wildlife ecological corridors in restoring functional connectivity of road-fragmented habitats using a stochastic movement model and scenario simulation: There is a fair amount known about corridors and connectivity, although not so much in urban environments. (I don’t normally toot my own horn, but since this is really something I have looked into that many others have not, feel free to have a look at Chapter 6 in my dissertation. No pressure. Some day I would love to distill this into a concise seminal academic paper, but I don’t have the bandwidth or library access these days.) People are starting to use agent-based, stochastic simulation in addition to older approaches based mostly on static land use/land cover analysis, which I find interesting.

the latest from Rockstrom et al.

Johan Rockstrom and company have a new paper talking about possible trajectories for the climate through the year 3000. There is a fair amount here, but one thing I find interesting is that while they are not talking about the highest emissions scenarios anymore (SSP3 under the CMIP6 framework), they are looking at a range of equilibrium climate sensitivities (ECS), and this makes a big difference. ECS, if I remember correctly, is the amount of global warming that occurs from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. If this value is 4 degrees C rather than 3, our situation gets much worse, with a peak of around 5 degrees C above preindustrial temperatures rather than the 3.5 expected under the lower ECS value. They show the peak sometime between 2200 and 2300. If this sets off catastrophic feedback loops, the system could get to a point well outside human control, even if we found the capacity and geopolitical will to get our act together.

That might happen, for example, in the case of large-scale dying or burning of forests (Reyer et al., 2015), or when carbon release from thawing permafrost (Turetsky et al., 2020) or gas hydrates on the ocean floor (Minshull et al., 2016) increases beyond current expectations. If such “natural” carbon release exceeds a potentially modest threshold (compare residual emissions experiment, Figure 1), warming may continue even if human forcing from GHG emissions or further land-use changes are virtually stopped. These human efforts would then be thwarted by the Earth system itself.

An important point is we don’t know the correct value of ECS yet – that should become clear with more data collection and research in coming decades. But the risk is existential enough that a species and civilization able to act together in a rational manner would be managing it now.

remote work as the cause of youth unemployment

This article says remote work, rather than AI, explains much of the recent slow hiring of new college graduates. It kind of makes sense to me – older managers came up in an environment where building relationships face-to-face was the foundation of productive teams. In my earlier career years, the unspoken expectation was that we spent more than 8 hours in the office, and a lot of that was “wasted” in a straight-up productivity sense, but not wasted in terms of building those relationships. There was also a fair amount of work-based socializing over lunch and after those 8+ hours in the actual office, and it was not unusual for significant quantities of alcohol to be involved. Mad Men may have been an caricature exaggerated for dramatic and comedic effect, but it gives some idea of what the work culture has lost. And some elements we have lost should not be missed. The work culture has just changed – even if younger workers are present face to face in the office, they are on screens and wearing headphones a lot of the time. If they are paid by the hour, they are not taking lunch breaks and they will stand up and walk away without saying goodbye at 5 pm. Without these younger workers around, I think older workers are also forgetting how to train and mentor younger workers effectively. I’m not saying all of this is bad – it represents a shift of priorities in our society. Maybe young people are using those hours outside of work to form relationships and find meaning that my generation tried to find at work. Their livers and odds of dying or killing someone else in a drunk driving accident are almost certainly better off. We may need to adapt to this rather than find “solutions”. Maybe AI can be the glue that holds together work culture in place of yesterday’s water cooler conversations and happy hours. Anyway, that’s my preamble – here is the article about remote work…

The Broken Ladder: AI, Remote Work, and Early-Career Hiring

Is generative AI replacing junior workers? A growing literature answers yes, citing large declines in early-career hiring concentrated in GenAI-exposed occupations. We argue that this verdict is premature because GenAI exposure is strongly correlated with another post-pandemic shock, working from home (WFH). Using two data sources spanning 243 million new hires and 407 million online job postings, collected across the US, UK, Canada, and Australia during 2017-2025, we estimate difference-in-difference designs at the occupation, region, and firm level. When estimated separately, a two-standard-deviation increase in GenAI and WFH exposure each predicts, by 2025, a fall of around 5pp in the junior-share of new hires and around 3pp in the share of job ads requiring limited experience. Estimated jointly, the WFH effect remains, while the GenAI coefficient attenuates sharply and is often statistically indistinguishable from zero. Alternative exposure measures, residualization designs, flexible non-parametric co-treatment controls, and replacing exposure-measures with actual WFH adoption as the treatment all support our finding that WFH is a robust predictor of the decline in early-career hiring.

first hints on CMIP7

This is the first story or post I personally have read on the IPCC’s Coupled Intercomparison Project (CMIP) round 7. I’m sure people who do climate science for a living are all over it. But I am not exactly a layperson – I’m an engineer who should aware of and probably incorporating climate science into my daily work. And not to brag but I am an engineer who has done Ph.D.-level research on how to use climate science and climate modeling outputs in daily engineering work. So if this is only on the periphery of my awareness, it is nowhere in the awareness of the typical intelligent and educated engineer out there designing the infrastructure that is going to be in place for the next decades to century in our cities.

As climate folk will know, the community is currently embarking on a new round of climate model simulations to support analyses and projections for the next IPCC report (due in 2028/9). This new effort has been dubbed CMIP7, because it is the sixth iteration of the CMIP effort (IYKYK), that started in the late 1990s. For each of these iterations, a new set of projections has been formulated for the modeling groups to use and the ones for this round were just published (van Vuuren et al., 2026).

For those who don’t know, the scenarios mentioned here are the inputs to the global circulation models that actually give us projections of what the global climate might look like under various…er…scenarios. Here is the abstract of the reference mentioned above:

The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project for CMIP7 (ScenarioMIP-CMIP7)

Scenarios represent a critical tool in climate change analysis, enabling the exploration of future evolution of the climate system, climate impacts, and the human system (including mitigation and adaptation actions). This paper describes the scenario framework for ScenarioMIP as part of CMIP7. The design process, initiated in June 2023, has involved various rounds of interaction with the research community and user groups at large. The proposal covers a set of scenarios exploring high levels of climate change (to explore high-end climate risks), medium levels of climate change (anchored to current policy action), and low levels of climate change (aligned with current international agreements). These scenarios follow very different trajectories in terms of emissions, with some likely to experience peaks and subsequent declines in greenhouse gas concentrations. An important innovation is that most scenarios are intended to be run, if possible, in emission-driven mode, providing a better representation of the earth system uncertainty space. The proposal also includes plans for long-term extensions (up to 2500 AD) to study slow climate change-related processes, and (ir)reversibility. This proposal forms the basis for further implementation of the framework in terms of the derivation of climate forcing pathways for use by earth system models and additional variants for adaptation and mitigation studies.

rewilding the city?

I think of “rewilding” as something that happens outside the city, but this literature review looks at how the concept could apply in an urban context.

Exploring rewilding as a potential design approach to improve urban biodiversity: A systematic review of the literature

Urban biodiversity continues to decline under rapid urbanization. Although biophilic design and green–blue infrastructure have strengthened nature integration into cities, planning and design practice often prioritizes human-centered service delivery and overlooks process-led recovery. Rewilding addresses this gap by foregrounding ecological autonomy, succession, and trophic complexity, yet its urban translation remains limited. This review therefore examined how rewilding could be operationalized as a design-oriented strategy in cities. An evidence-to-design roadmap was proposed to link rewilding logics, biodiversity aims, and urban planning and design, with a dual-level protocol adopted: 1) a macro-level scientometric overview of 1184 records (1990–2025) to locate urban rewilding studies within the broader literature; and 2) a micro-level PRISMA-guided synthesis of 103 spatially explicit studies coded by rewilding pathway (active/passive), targets, spatial and temporal scales, data, methods, and spatial variables. Macro mapping indicated that urban-related studies were late-emerging and weakly consolidated. Micro synthesis revealed pathway differences: passive studies primarily traced vegetation and landscape trajectories, while active studies employed suitability and connectivity modeling for intervention screening. Urban studies remained scarce (N = 9), with passive studies dominant and connectivity analyses particularly common, focusing on vegetation, birds, and planning-oriented targets. Building on these patterns, this study derived a four-level framework comprising design intent, strategic planning, tactical methodology, and operational application, translating rewilding into staged, scalable decisions aligned with urban planning and design workflows. This review positioned rewilding as a process-centered complement to conventional landscape design approaches, offering an actionable pathway for embedding biodiversity regeneration within urban systems.

bibliometrix

Bibliometrix is an R package for literature review and synthesis of past research on a topic. It now has a Shiny graphical interface.

bibliometrix: An R-tool for comprehensive science mapping analysis

The use of bibliometrics is gradually extending to all disciplines. It is particularly suitable for science mapping at a time when the emphasis on empirical contributions is producing voluminous, fragmented, and controversial research streams. Science mapping is complex and unwieldly because it is multi-step and frequently requires numerous and diverse software tools, which are not all necessarily freeware. Although automated workflows that integrate these software tools into an organized data flow are emerging, in this paper we propose a unique open-source tool, designed by the authors, called bibliometrix, for performing comprehensive science mapping analysis. bibliometrix supports a recommended workflow to perform bibliometric analyses. As it is programmed in R, the proposed tool is flexible and can be rapidly upgraded and integrated with other statistical R-packages. It is therefore useful in a constantly changing science such as bibliometrics.

Has Trump pulled off the equivalent of a politically impossible global carbon tax?

Well, certainly not on purpose! He almost certainly thinks he is advancing the agenda of nominally US-based multinational oil companies. But by limiting the supply of oil and gas world wide, he has at least temporarily brought about the peak oil scenario that seemed to be fashionable a decade or two ago, and then mostly forgotten as it looked like new fossil fuel discoveries and exploitation technologies, along with non-fossil-fuel technologies, might outstrip any hard limit in the (economically viable) geologic supply.

But now we get to find out what an actual hard limit on supply looks like. It won’t be permanent – we can speculate months to years. But electrification technology was already a snowball rolling downhill in Asia, and this will just accelerate the takeover of electric vehicles, even if effective propaganda is hiding this from the U.S. public. Governments like Thailand’s are making rational policy choices such as incentivizing trade-in of internal combustion engines for electric. The economic incentive to do this is there, and has been slowed down until now only by infrastructure lock-in and path dependence. Even if this disruption is measured in months or years, the technology will continue to progress even in that time, and rational governments will realize this shut-down situation can happen again in the future and that they can mitigate the risk. So thank you to the one-man wrecking ball who has made all this short-term pain (i.e., horrible suffering and death for many, many human beings which I don’t mean to make light of) and long-term gain possible! (Now, you could say, and I admit, that with electrification coal will be substituted for oil and gas in the near to medium term, and this is not a win for the environment. I actually don’t know if it is a net win or loss, when you consider the greater efficiency of electrification over mobile internal combustion engines. But the incentives still favor renewables longer-term, and the incentives get stronger and stronger as renewables continue to get cheaper while coal as far as I know does not.)

A coalition of the willing implementing an international carbon tax is still a theoretical possibility. Here is one article on what that could look like. It is hard for me to imagine politically, but let’s say a group of large non-oil-producing economies, led for example by China, India, and the Asian Development Bank, decided they were going to do this and impose equivalent border-adjustment taxes (legal under the WTO I think not that this seems to matter any more) on all trading partners not doing it.

An international plan for sustainable development

International cooperation on climate and taxation remains inadequate to deliver decarbonisation, reduce poverty, and finance sustainable development at the required scale. We propose a Sustainable Union among willing countries, combining carbon pricing, new taxes on wealth, polluting fuels, financial transactions, and corporate income, with international revenue-sharing and conditional cooperation mechanisms. Most revenues would remain with participating governments for domestic spending, while a defined share would be pooled internationally. Specifically, participating countries would contribute 1% of gross national income (GNI) to a common pool redistributed in proportion to population, generating net transfers from richer to poorer countries. Meanwhile, the remainder of the revenue would increase domestic fiscal space by on average 2.2% of GNI. Although politically ambitious, such a framework might be credible, as governments are already advancing related forms of voluntary cooperation, and survey evidence indicates that it would be supported by majorities worldwide.