ASU Scholarship Showcase

Does school participatory budgeting (SPB) increase students’ political efficacy? SPB, which is implemented in thousands of schools around the world, is a democratic process of deliberation and decision-making in which students determine how to spend a portion of the school’s budget. We examined the impact of SPB on political efficacy in one middle school in Arizona. Our participants’ (n = 28) responses on survey items designed to measure self-perceived growth in political efficacy indicated a large effect size (Cohen’s d = 1.46), suggesting that SPB is an effective approach to civic pedagogy, with promising prospects for developing students’ political efficacy.

Summer daytime cooling efficiency of various land cover is investigated for the urban core of Phoenix, Arizona, using the Local-Scale Urban Meteorological Parameterization Scheme (LUMPS). We examined the urban energy balance for 2 summer days in 2005 to analyze the daytime cooling-water use tradeoff and the timing of sensible heat reversal at night. The plausibility of the LUMPS model results was tested using remotely sensed surface temperatures from Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) imagery and reference evapotranspiration values from a meteorological station. Cooling efficiency was derived from sensible and latent heat flux differences. The time when the sensible heat flux turns negative (sensible heat flux transition) was calculated from LUMPS simulated hourly fluxes. Results indicate that the time when the sensible heat flux changes direction at night is strongly influenced by the heat storage capacity of different land cover types and by the amount of vegetation. Higher heat storage delayed the transition up to 3 h in the study area, while vegetation expedited the sensible heat reversal by 2 h. Cooling efficiency index results suggest that overall, the Phoenix urban core is slightly more efficient at cooling than the desert, but efficiencies do not increase much with wet fractions higher than 20%. Industrial sites with high impervious surface cover and low wet fraction have negative cooling efficiencies. Findings indicate that drier neighborhoods with heterogeneous land uses are the most efficient landscapes in balancing cooling and water use in Phoenix. However, further factors such as energy use and human vulnerability to extreme heat have to be considered in the cooling-water use tradeoff, especially under the uncertainties of future climate change.

Pay-for-performance (PFP) is a relatively new approach to agricultural conservation that attaches an incentive payment to quantified reductions in nutrient runoff from a participating farm. Similar to a payment for ecosystem services approach, PFP lends itself to providing incentives for the most beneficial practices at the field level. To date, PFP conservation in the U.S. has only been applied in small pilot programs. Because monitoring conservation performance for each field enrolled in a program would be cost-prohibitive, field-level modeling can provide cost-effective estimates of anticipated improvements in nutrient runoff. We developed a PFP system that uses a unique application of one of the leading agricultural models, the USDA's Soil and Water Assessment Tool, to evaluate the nutrient load reductions of potential farm practice changes based on field-level agronomic and management data. The initial phase of the project focused on simulating individual fields in the River Raisin watershed in southeastern Michigan. Here we present development of the modeling approach and results from the pilot year, 2015-2016. These results stress that (1) there is variability in practice effectiveness both within and between farms, and thus there is not one "best practice" for all farms, (2) conservation decisions are made most effectively at the scale of the farm field rather than the sub-watershed or watershed level, and (3) detailed, field-level management information is needed to accurately model and manage on-farm nutrient loadings.