Environment

SimWatershed is loosely based on the real-life Esopus Creek watershed, part of the naturally-cleaned water supply of New York City. SimWatershed implements two online labs, for the Yale School of Forestry graduate course Science to Solutions: How Should We Manage Water.

In the "Biophysics" lab, students explore how water quality is affected by adjusting land use - suburban, agricultural, livestock, and forest. Then in the "Solutions" lab, buying land costs money and faces limits. Other social treatments are available at a price: best management practices, upgrading the local sewage treatment plant, raising prices, or building a city water treatment plant. Scenarios explore present and future, nitrogen and sediment.

Download the "Solutions" lab instructions.

One of my scientific projects, LoadRunner automates the calculation of dissolved river loads, based on public US Geographical Society river flow and water quality sample data. This is a user interface level to automate running LOADEST over whole watersheds. LoadRunner is used to research ocean carbon sequestration, among other things. Runs on Windows and Mac OSX.

Built the software for a barcode-driven Long Island Sound kiosk at the Peabody Museum of Natural History. This kiosk has a collection of barcoded items from Long Island Sound, and a barcode scannner, to make the kiosk display information on that item. Visitors can also get their own barcode, and scan themselves in, and leave a webcam video message. None of this is online, unfortunately, due to concerns from Yale Legal.

ArchaeoSim explores social and environmental tradeoffs in ancient farming civilizations in ancient Subir (northern Mesopotamia). Includes detailed paleoclimate data and completed archaeological survey data. Used in teaching the Yale course Human Creation and Destruction of Environments.

The Carbon Cycle uses an equilibration model to show how once fossil carbon is released into the air, it migrates into various carbon sinks - atmosphere, terrestrial plants, soil, ocean surface, and deep ocean. Explores changes in fossil fuel usage, net deforestation, and melting tundra.

Demographics explores population growth pyramids, much like my earlier Human Demographics simulator, where you can change birth and death rate schedules. In this rendition, the user can set vital rates to match those of a different country. (E.g., how would India's population develop under US birthrates.) Countries: USA, China, Egypt, India, Italy, Mexico, and Nigeria.

Disease demonstrates contagious disease spread through a population. Three diseases (Kold, Impfluenza, and Red Death) are supplied, and the user can create variations with different incubation, deathrate, etc. parameters. Explores the effects of population density, population mixing, vaccination strategies, and pitting one virus against another.

Ecology is a construct-your-own-foodweb simulator, from a supplied collection of plants, herbivores, omnivores, and a top predator. Explores competition and trophic switching.

Energy explores meeting energy demand via assorted technologies, while trying to keep atmospheric CO2 below the international goal of 550 ppm through the year 2100.

ForestNPP is a simple calculator that estimates forest net primary productivity, before and after climate change scenarios, based on the Osnabruck Biosphere Model. Environmental science teaching simulator.