John Bellemore
Research Mentor(s): Chang Wang
Mentor Department: Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise
Authors: John Bellemore
Session: Session 2 (10:00am – 10:50am)
Presentation Type: Poster 42
Abstract
Strategically placed and properly planned green areas in cities are becoming increasingly popular and preferable. Green spaces promote walkability, futurist aesthetics, and overall pleasantness. While they look good and improve quality of life, it is hypothesized that the introduction of green spaces also impact the surrounding property values and economic health of the urban areas they are located in. Thus, this project looks into how green spaces affect the economic health of urban areas. Before uncovering this, however, the project must determine a way of calculating a biodiversity metric for a given area. The project looks into various temporal and spatial biodiversity metrics to do this. First, several papers pertaining to the effects of chemical pollutants on certain specific environments were reviewed to better understand their relationship. To quantify these effects, global coordinate systems, chemical categorization systems, and biodiversity abundance and incidence data were researched. To effectively analyze the data, several R functions were researched and ran to develop more accurate estimates on biodiversity abundance data. Through this ecological and economic analysis, the effects of green spaces in urban areas will be quantified in a way that can shape future policy choices and improve quality of life as well as environmental and economic health.
