Individual project

You generate the idea for a simple project that interests you.

Pick your topic, come up with a question, design the analysis, run it, and write up a report.

Expectations

To encourage creativity, expectations are flexible and open-ended:

• Do something you have not done before.

  • You’re welcome to reuse data and ideas from earlier classes or research projects.

• (Try to) find out something you can’t find out without doing your own analysis.

• Use some of the tools you learned in this course.

  • Make sure geospatial data is needed to answer your question.

  • You don’t have to use data or methods from the labs (conservation planning, cost estimation, or impact analysis) if you find other questions more interesting.

• Link it to a policy objective, either formally (with an objective function) or, at minimum, as part of the narrative (e.g., if you focus on a technical aspect of a bigger puzzle).

• Your contribution needs to stand on its own.

  • You can collaborate with others to make your project bigger and better.

This open-ended approach has been the default in EE 508 so far.

Themes

Students have chosen different routes as starting points for their projects:

• Many addressed a question that remained open after finishing a lab, by adding a variation in data, methods, or perspective.

• Others used the opportunity to make progress on a research or policy question they were interested in, often adding a spatial dimension or explicit policy choice.

I encourage you to think as broadly as you wish here.

When it comes to data & expertise, I tend to be most helpful if you want to think about:

• Quantifying values, threat, and/or cost

• Identifying priorities for a potential intervention

• Modeling the impact of a potential intervention

• Estimating the impact of an existing intervention

Process

If you choose the individual project, we will develop your project over several stages:

Prospectus

5%, completion grade

Identify a policy issue that interests you. Then define a decision problem that a donor, government, or nonprofit who also cares about your problem might try to solve in real life. This involves:

1. Defining an objective function.

   Q: what is the needle you want to move?

   Describe desirable outcomes, then try to find a measure of each outcome that scales in proportion to how valuable that outcome is to the constituency of your analysis.

   Things to ponder:

   • What is the shape of the function? Do marginal benefits decline with quantity? Increase? Stay constant (linear function)?

   • How many different objectives do you want to include? Fewer will be easier, data-wise, but you might miss more things people care about.

   • If you have potentially diverging objectives (e.g. ecosystem conservation outcomes vs. benefits to locals), how will you put them together?

     Note

     A frequent answer to this question is some linear addition of constantly weighted objectives, e.g.:

     \[objective = 0.6\ * objective1\ + 0.4\ * objective2\]

     This is a perfectly fine answer to this question for the purpose of this project.

     But note that this choice hides the implication that the two objectives (goods) become perfectly substitutable (you can replace one by any constantly scaled quantity of the other to get the same overall measure on your objective function). While this assumption might be true in some private-good contexts (to substitute between consumer goods, for instance), it rarely sits right with how people think about various environmental and social goals.

2. Defining options that the policy maker has to choose between: your choice variable(s)

   Q: what can the policy maker do to move the needle on your objective function?

   Some options include:

   • Voting yes or no on policy X (binary choice: presence/absence).

   • Voting on the height of a program budget (continuous choice, e.g., for optimal carbon conservation, for enforcement).

   • Determining locations to conserve (or specific actions in locations).

   As a baseline comparison, consider simply handing over your entire project budget to the project beneficiaries instead (according to an algorithm that satifies your fairness criterion). Are you certain that wouldn’t move their world to a better place in a more tangible ways than you propose?

3. Providing a description (a simple model) of the social-ecological system of interest.

   Q: How will each policy option affect your objective function?

If you would like to meet with me to speak about your project and project plan, feel free to book my office hours, or email me directly to ask for a separate meeting time.

Project plan

5%, completion grade

Formulate your policy / decision question and your analytical plan.

The project plan:

• refines the decision problem (objective, choices, model to get from choices to objective).

• lists all datasets you need, mentions the ones you have access to, and identifies a deadline for when you will stop looking for more data.

• clarifies how you will use the data to answer your question.

Final report

5%

Conduct your analysis, and write up your problem, methods, and findings in a short report.

Example questions

These are the types of questions we’re working on in my lab. Feel free to contact me if you’d like to work with the data or towards similar questions.

• Did land acquisitions or payments for environmental services (PES) have larger impacts on deforestation in the Colombian Andes?

• How strongly do changes in lake water quality affect recreational benefits and values of lakehouse owners in the contiguous U.S.?

• How accurately can we estimate the value of vacant properties with conservation potential in the contiguous U.S.?

• What is the economic value of expected damages of hurricanes on building stocks across North Carolina and Texas, and how it is distributed?

Optional: create your own parcel dataset

If you want to build your own property-level dataset for your project, you’re welcome to see whether openplaces can help you with that.

openplaces (GitHub, docs) is open-source software that downloads parcel, building, and transaction data from public sources and harmonizes them to a common schema. It is the successor to PLACES, which produced the Massachusetts parcel data used in Lab 3.

In Lab 3, you use a prepared parcel-level dataset for an analysis of land cover change. With openplaces, you can create your own to study something nobody else has before you, or test a finding from the published literature in a new location.

The repository is under active development. You can explore current data availability (via public downloads) in the recipe list.

Top-rated projects will be linked from this website. Contributions to the public codebase are also possible and 100% voluntary (I will ignore pull requests until grades are in). If your code is merged, you will be credited as a contributor.