Sbir phase II: ecosystem design tool

Hyphae Design Laboratory LLC was awarded a $999,592 cooperative agreement from the National Science Foundation to develop an ecosystem design tool. The goal of the project is to create software that will help environmental justice communities, ecosystem designers, health insurers, governments, and local businesses implement cost-effective ecosystem interventions to improve air quality and mitigate heat islands. The tool will use high resolution vegetation analysis and machine learning algorithms to infer vegetation properties from widely available data streams. It will then integrate these metrics into a geospatial design automation pipeline. Communities will be able to use the tool to design targeted tree plantings that maximize health and financial benefits. The tool will also quantify air quality and heat island impacts to calculate associated financial health benefits. This will help leverage private financing to improve public health and the environment. The award aligns with the National Science Foundation's Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships program to advance innovation leading to solutions for national challenges through breakthrough technologies.

Abstract

The broader/commercial impact of this small business innovation research (sbir) phase II project is to enable communities impacted by air pollution and extreme heat to design and implement solutions to these problems in a fast and cost-effective way. Air pollution increases the risk of cancer, stroke, heart-disease, and respiratory infections, and may play a role in alzheimer?s and diabetes, resulting in human suffering and trillions of dollars of health care costs globally each year. Extreme heat is a growing source of additional health-care concerns and costs. These costs are shouldered by insurance companies, governments, businesses, and citizens. Air pollution can be reduced by carefully placed trees. These trees also reduce extreme heat by shading and evaporation of water. There is potential for improving human health via targeted engineering of tree placements. This project will develop analysis and design tools to help with such tree plantings to generate the maximum possible health and financial benefits, at the lowest cost and with the shortest timelines. Local businesses can use this tool to make sure that they get paid fairly for reducing health care cost burdens of health insurance companies, governments, and pollution producers, while making communities and the environment more resilient. While existing literature indicates that trees may provide an effective air pollution and heat-island mitigation strategy. Stakeholders seeking to implement such strategies need tools to ensure that the plantings are as effective as possible. Existing planning tools are not of sufficient resolution or site specific, and often do not employ evidence-based design strategies. This project will perform high resolution vegetation analysis on a wide variety of neighborhoods. This data will be used to train a set of algorithms to infer high resolution vegetation properties from widely available, low-cost data streams. These inferred vegetation metrics will be integrated with a geospatial ecosystem design automation pipeline to create a software tool. The software tool will provide environmental justice communities, ecosystem designers, health insurance companies, governments, and local businesses with the ability to implement cost-effective ecosystem interventions with quantifiable air quality and heat island benefits. These benefits can be used to calculate financial health benefits. Because the benefits quantification will be based on ongoing validation and monitoring projects, the tool can be used to leverage private financing for improving public health and improving the environment. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.