Projects
From pollution control and remediation to water management and governance. I work on projects that use data to bridge science, economics, and policy, developing holistic insights and informing decision making
Innovative policies for coordinating water supply diversification through market mechanisms
This ongoing work explores the potential for market-based mechanisms to incentivize coordination of water management approaches in the pursuit of water supply diversification.
We are working closely with Sonoma County Water Agency to asses supply and demand characteristics in the region (see link to story map on the left), highlighting challenges and opportunities to the introduction of alternative water supplies through collaborative efforts. See below for preliminary work exploring market-based approaches for incentivizing water conservation. |
Coordinating water conservation efforts through tradable credits: A proof of concept for drought response in the San Francisco Bay area
Published work:
See Q&A published by Water Deeply
- Gonzales, P., N.K. Ajami, and Y. Sun. Coordinating water conservation efforts through tradable credits: a proof of concept for drought response in the San Francisco Bay Area. Water Resources Research (2017). DOI: 10.1002/2017WR020636 (Peer reviewed) Link
See Q&A published by Water Deeply
A Resilience Framework for the Changing Urban Water Paradigm
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Developed a flexible and bottom-up framework that facilitates integration of local characteristics in evaluation of various water resource management strategies. Demonstrated the application of this framework on a case study in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Published work:
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"Articulate": A novel search algorithm for quantifying news media coverage as a measure of environmental issue salience
Contributed to the development of a novel and open-source news search algorithm, "Articulate", written in Python and using the Google Custom Search Engine API. Applied this tool to demonstrate the correlation between newsmedia coverage and public interest in the California drought and Texas floods in the past decade.
Published work:
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Rebounding from the drought: Collective action, public awareness, and water use efficiency trends
Applied the concept of social memory - a community’s inherited knowledge about hazardous events or degraded environmental conditions from past experiences- to develop a model of water demand and rebound as a function of both structural and social factors. Through a comparative assessment of three Bay Area utilities from 1980 to 2017, demonstrated that policies, public outreach, and better data availability have played a key role in raising public awareness of water scarcity, especially with the raise of the internet era in recent years.
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Published work:
- P. Gonzales and N.K. Ajami. Social and Structural Patterns of Drought-Related Water Conservation and Rebound. Water Resources Research (2017). DOI: 10.1002/2017WR021852. (Peer reviewed) Link
Visualizing California's Dynamic Urban Water Use
Explored factors driving water use and conservation in California. Quantified conservation response during the recent historic drought, and analyzed emerging trends using a statewide dataset compiled by the State Water Resources Control Board. Developed an interactive web portal to visualize insights from the recent drought, which was named a finalist in the 2016 California Water Data Challenge.
See news article published by the Stanford News Service |
Understanding urban water reliability amidst changes in supply and demand
Developed bottom-up assessment metrics and identified drivers of changing water supply and demand characteristics in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as opportunities to enhance future regional water reliability.
Published work:
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Laboratory dust generation and size-dependent characterization of metal and metalloid contaminated mine tailing deposits
Interdisciplinary effort looking at the mobilization, toxicity, and bioavailability of arsenic associated with dust particles from the Iron King Mine superfund site in Humboldt, AZ. Designed and built a laboratory dust-generating machine. Performed geochemical characterization of samples. Traced the origin and mobility of arsenic in dust using methods such as size fractionation and stable isotope fingerprinting.
Published work:
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