One of my research objective is to inform stakeholders and managers based on high-resolution climate models outputs, and work with them to translate climate information into mitigation and adaptation strategies. My research investigates how interactions among social and ecological systems influence resilience of urban socio-ecological systems to extreme heat across geographic and decision scales in a context of changing climate and social change [Sharma et al 2013; 2014b]. The following are some topics and questions that I plan to pursue in translational and interdisciplinary research:
1. How does evolving urbanization, climate change and social processes affect ecological footprint and resilience of ecological systems to extreme heat?
2. Urban ecological systems: community gardens, green roofs, low impact development areas, parks, green spaces, wilderness areas.
3. Interactions between urban land cover/use of varying scales with climate (sensitivity experiments: interactions between urban ecology and the urban heat island, with a particular emphasis on urban gardens and other green spaces and how they might reduce the UHI for a variety of green space and urban density configurations).
4. Design of urban stormwater management systems in response to changing precipitation and storm characteristics.