The City of Phoenix Street Transportation Department partnered with the Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Service at Arizona State University (ASU) and researchers from various ASU schools to evaluate the effectiveness, performance, and community perception of the new pavement coating. The data collection and analysis occurred across multiple neighborhoods and at varying times across days and/or months over the course of one year (July 15, 2020–July 14, 2021), allowing the team to study the impacts of the surface treatment under various weather conditions.

Sustainable fisheries management is key to restoring and maintaining ecological function and benefits to people, but it requires accurate information about patterns of resource use, particularly fishing pressure. In most coral reef fisheries and other data-poor contexts, obtaining such information is challenging and remains an impediment to effective management. We developed the most comprehensive regional view of shore-based fishing effort and catch published to date, to show detailed fishing patterns from across the main Hawaiian Islands (MHI). We reveal these regional patterns through fisher “creel” surveys conducted by local communities, state agencies, academics, and/or environmental organizations, at 18 sites, comprising >10,000 h of monitoring across a range of habitats and human influences throughout the MHI. All creel surveys included in this study except for one were previously published in some form (peer-reviewed articles or gray literature reports). Here, we synthesize these studies to document spatial patterns in nearshore fisheries catch, effort, catch rates (i.e., catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE)), and catch disposition (i.e., use of fish after catch is landed). This effort provides for a description of general regional patterns based on these location-specific studies. Line fishing was by far the dominant gear type employed. The most efficient gear (i.e., highest CPUE) was spear (0.64 kg h^-1), followed closely by net (0.61 kg h^-1), with CPUE for line (0.16 kg h^-1) substantially lower than the other two methods. Creel surveys also documented illegal fishing activity across the studied locations, although these activities were not consistent across sites. Overall, most of the catch was not sold, but rather retained for home consumption or given away to extended family, which suggests that cultural practices and food security may be stronger drivers of fishing effort than commercial exploitation for coral reef fisheries in Hawai‘i. Increased monitoring of spatial patterns in nearshore fisheries can inform targeted management, and can help communities develop a more informed understanding of the drivers of marine resource harvest and the state of the resources, in order to maintain these fisheries for food security, cultural practices, and ecological value.

This study assesses whether multifunctional edible landscaping business models provide a sufficient business case at enterprise and city scales to justify widespread implementation. First, semi-structured interviews were conducted with four landscaping entrepreneurs, and the information obtained from the interviews was utilized to carry out a business model comparison with the Business Model Canvas framework. The comparison showed that the landscaping enterprises using multifunctional edible landscaping methods possessed a greater range of value propositions and revenue streams, enhancing their competitive advantage. Second, a GIS landscape analysis of seven Phoenix metro area cities was carried out to identify landscapes that were suited for becoming multifunctional edible landscapes. The GIS analysis identified single family residential, residential recreational open space, municipal parks, and municipal schools as being suitable landscapes, and that the area of these landscapes in the seven cities exceeded 180,000 acres. Third, scenarios were created using interview and GIS data to estimate potential value creation and return on investment of implementing multifunctional edible landscaping in the cities of interest. The scenarios found that the potential value creation of edible landscaping ranged between $3.9 and $66 billion, and that positive return on investment (ROI) could be achieved in 11 out of 12 scenarios within one to five years. Finally, the paper concludes by discussing potential long-term implications of implementing multifunctional edible urban landscaping, as well as possible future directions for multifunctional landscaping business model development and research.

Construction waste management has become extremely important due to stricter disposal and landfill regulations, and a lesser number of available landfills. There are extensive works done on waste treatment and management of the construction industry. Concepts like deconstruction, recyclability, and Design for Disassembly (DfD) are examples of better construction waste management methods. Although some authors and organizations have published rich guides addressing the DfD's principles, there are only a few buildings already developed in this area. This study aims to find the challenges in the current practice of deconstruction activities and the gaps between its theory and implementation. Furthermore, it aims to provide insights about how DfD can create opportunities to turn these concepts into strategies that can be largely adopted by the construction industry stakeholders in the near future.

An assessment framework was developed to evaluate and characterize material recovery facilities within the U.S. that process e-waste. The framework consists of five key categories including, facility overview, operating model and process flows, product flows, collection methods, and facility resource use. The results were used to conduct a material flow analysis to develop a representative set of end-of-life pathways (e.g., reuse, refurbish, recycle) to better understand the flow of e-waste in the end-of-life management industry. The majority of products collected was from business sector collection routes. The largest number of products (by units) collected at 90% of facilities was mobile phones. It was also seen that most products went directly to recycling for material recovery and were not in the condition to be re-used or refurbished.

The ways in which we travel—by what mode, for how long, and for what purpose—can affect our sense of happiness and well-being. This paper assesses the relationships between measures of the sustainability of transportation systems in U.S. metropolitan areas and subjective well-being. Associations between self-reported happiness levels from the Gallup Healthways Well-being Index and commute data were examined for 187 core-based statistical areas (CBSA). We also supplement this quantitative analysis through brief case studies of high- and low-performing happiness cities. Our quantitative results indicate that regions with higher commute mode shares by non-automobile modes generally had higher well-being scores, even when controlling for important economic predictors of happiness. We also find that pro-sustainable transportation policies can have implications for population-wide happiness and well-being. Our case studies indicate that both high and low scoring happiness cities demonstrate a dedicated commitment to improving sustainable transportation infrastructure. Our study suggests that cities that provide incentives for residents to use more sustainable commute modes may offer greater opportunity for happiness than those that do not.

Predicting how forest carbon cycling will change in response to climate change and management depends on the collective knowledge from measurements across environmental gradients, ecosystem manipulations of global change factors, and mathematical models. Formally integrating these sources of knowledge through data assimilation, or model–data fusion, allows the use of past observations to constrain model parameters and estimate prediction uncertainty. Data assimilation (DA) focused on the regional scale has the opportunity to integrate data from both environmental gradients and experimental studies to constrain model parameters.

Here, we introduce a hierarchical Bayesian DA approach (Data Assimilation to Predict Productivity for Ecosystems and Regions, DAPPER) that uses observations of carbon stocks, carbon fluxes, water fluxes, and vegetation dynamics from loblolly pine plantation ecosystems across the southeastern US to constrain parameters in a modified version of the Physiological Principles Predicting Growth (3-PG) forest growth model. The observations included major experiments that manipulated atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentration, water, and nutrients, along with nonexperimental surveys that spanned environmental gradients across an 8.6  ×  10⁵ km² region. We optimized regionally representative posterior distributions for model parameters, which dependably predicted data from plots withheld from the data assimilation. While the mean bias in predictions of nutrient fertilization experiments, irrigation experiments, and CO₂ enrichment experiments was low, future work needs to focus modifications to model structures that decrease the bias in predictions of drought experiments.

Predictions of how growth responded to elevated CO₂ strongly depended on whether ecosystem experiments were assimilated and whether the assimilated field plots in the CO₂ study were allowed to have different mortality parameters than the other field plots in the region. We present predictions of stem biomass productivity under elevated CO₂, decreased precipitation, and increased nutrient availability that include estimates of uncertainty for the southeastern US. Overall, we (1) demonstrated how three decades of research in southeastern US planted pine forests can be used to develop DA techniques that use multiple locations, multiple data streams, and multiple ecosystem experiment types to optimize parameters and (2) developed a tool for the development of future predictions of forest productivity for natural resource managers that leverage a rich dataset of integrated ecosystem observations across a region.