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publications

Farmer adaptation to reduced groundwater availability

Published in Environmental Research Letters, 2019

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Recommended citation: Katrina Running, Morey Burnham, Chloe Wardropper, Zhao Ma, Jason Hawes, Margaret Bray, "Farmer adaptation to reduced groundwater availability." Environmental Research Letters, 2019.

Applying the Food-Energy-Water Nexus approach to urban agriculture: from FEW to FEWP (Food-Energy-Water-People)

Published in Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 2020

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Recommended citation: Silvio Caputo, Victoria Schoen, Kathrin Specht, Baptiste Grard, Chris Blythe, Nevin Cohen, Runrid Fox-Kämper, Jason Hawes, Joshua Newell, Lidia Poniży, "Applying the Food-Energy-Water Nexus approach to urban agriculture: from FEW to FEWP (Food-Energy-Water-People)." Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 2020.
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Differences in motivations and social impacts across urban agriculture types: Case studies in Europe and the US

Published in Landscape and Urban Planning, 2021

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Recommended citation: Caitlin Kirby, Kathrin Specht, Runrid Fox-Kämper, Jason Hawes, Nevin Cohen, Silvio Caputo, Rositsa Ilieva, Agnès Lelièvre, Lidia Poniży, Victoria Schoen, Chris Blythe, "Differences in motivations and social impacts across urban agriculture types: Case studies in Europe and the US." Landscape and Urban Planning, 2021.
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Global Service-Learning: A Systematic Review of Principles and Practices

Published in International Journal of Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement, 2021

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Recommended citation: Jason Hawes, Rebecca Johnson, Lindsey Payne, Christian Ley, Caitlin Grady, Jennifer Domenech, Carly Evich, Andrew Kanach, Allison Koeppen, Kirsten Roe, Audrey Caprio, Jessica Puente, Paige LeMaster, Ernest Blatchley, "Global Service-Learning: A Systematic Review of Principles and Practices." International Journal of Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement, 2021.
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Food production and resource use of urban farms and gardens: a five-country study

Published in Agronomy for Sustainable Development, 2023

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Recommended citation: Erica Dorr, Jason Hawes, Benjamin Goldstein, Agnès Fargue-Lelièvre, Runrid Fox-Kämper, Kathrin Specht, Konstancja Fedeńczak, Silvio Caputo, Nevin Cohen, Lidia Poniży, Victoria Schoen, Tomasz Górecki, Joshua Newell, Liliane Jean-Soro, Baptiste Grard, "Food production and resource use of urban farms and gardens: a five-country study." Agronomy for Sustainable Development, 2023.
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Critical pedagogical designs for SETS knowledge co-production: online peer- and problem-based learning by and for early career green infrastructure experts

Published in Urban Transformations, 2023

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Recommended citation: Mathieu Feagan, Megan Fork, Geneva Gray, Maike Hamann, Jason Hawes, Elizabeth Hiroyasu, Brooke Wilkerson, "Critical pedagogical designs for SETS knowledge co-production: online peer- and problem-based learning by and for early career green infrastructure experts." Urban Transformations, 2023.
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Comparing the carbon footprints of urban and conventional agriculture

Published in Nature Cities, 2024

Publisher: Nature Publishing Group

Recommended citation: Jason Hawes, Benjamin Goldstein, Joshua Newell, Erica Dorr, Silvio Caputo, Runrid Fox-Kämper, Baptiste Grard, Rositsa Ilieva, Agnès Fargue-Lelièvre, Lidia Poniży, Victoria Schoen, Kathrin Specht, Nevin Cohen, "Comparing the carbon footprints of urban and conventional agriculture." Nature Cities, 2024.
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A typology of resource circularity in cities

Published in Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 2026

Recommended citation: Benjamin Goldstein, Daniel Levy, Jason Hawes, Brendan Finn, "A typology of resource circularity in cities." Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 227, 108743, 2026.
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research

AI Best Practices for Industrial Ecology

This project comprises two parallel research efforts examining the state of artificial intelligence and machine learning in industrial ecology — a field that increasingly relies on computational methods to model material flows, supply chains, and environmental impacts.

AI-Optimized Controlled Environment Agriculture

Controlled environment agriculture — indoor farming systems that regulate temperature, light, water, and nutrients to grow food year-round — offers a promising pathway for food system resilience in regions with short growing seasons and precarious supply chains, including much of Wyoming. But CEA has a significant sustainability liability: its energy intensity. Without careful management, the electricity demands of indoor farming can undermine the very environmental goals it is meant to serve.

AI for Wyoming, By Wyoming

Wyoming is ground zero for a quiet but consequential transformation. A single proposed data center would draw five times the state’s residential electricity consumption. Meanwhile, AI is reshaping ranching, telehealth, wildfire response, and rural governance. The University of Wyoming has received $9 million in federal funding to launch the AI4WY initiative. Yet in the decisions driving this transformation — about energy rates, land use, job displacement, and the terms on which AI enters rural life — the everyday perspectives of Wyoming residents are largely absent.

ARCAP — Alaska Railbelt Critical Assets Project

Alaska’s Railbelt region is one of the most logistically isolated population corridors in the United States — a linear chain of communities, utilities, and transportation infrastructure connecting Fairbanks in the interior to the Kenai Peninsula in the south. The region’s dependence on a small number of critical nodes makes it acutely vulnerable to disruption: if key infrastructure fails, there are few alternative pathways for food, fuel, and essential goods.

Assessing Gentrification in Michigan’s Coastal Communities

Blue gentrification — the displacement of long-term residents from communities near lakes, rivers, and coastlines by amenity-seeking in-migration — is an increasingly visible but poorly understood challenge across the Great Lakes region. Michigan, with more coastline than any other contiguous state, presents a particularly important context: its shoreline communities have experienced significant waterfront investment, including through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI), alongside rapid increases in property values, vacation rental activity, and demographic change.

Inventory and Evaluation of Operational Fire Potential Forecasts Across Scales for Decision Support

Wildland fire managers operate in an environment of forecasting abundance: dozens of fire potential forecast products exist, produced by federal agencies, research centers, and private companies at scales ranging from individual incidents to national outlooks. Yet these tools have never been fully cataloged, and their operational reliability has not been independently evaluated. Practitioners interviewed in prior work consistently reported being overwhelmed by the number of available products and uncertain about which to trust — a gap this project is designed to close.

Coupled Hazard Modeling for Rural and Gateway Communities

Wildfire in the American West is increasingly understood not as an isolated natural event but as a coupled phenomenon — one that links atmospheric dynamics, landscape processes, and human communities in ways that create cascading risks. Rural and gateway communities in Wyoming and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem are among the most exposed to these dynamics: economically dependent on outdoor recreation and natural amenities, geographically isolated, and often lacking the institutional capacity of larger urban centers to absorb and recover from disruption.

Digital Twin Readiness and Equity in Small Cities

Digital twins have transformed infrastructure management and urban planning in large, well-resourced cities — but their promise for small towns is far from guaranteed. Cities with robust data infrastructure, IT staffing, and governance capacity capture disproportionate benefits from smart city innovations, producing a growing “smart urban divide.” For small cities like Laramie and Afton, Wyoming, the question is not simply whether digital twins are technically feasible but whether they are equitable: who gets to use them, who benefits, and whether their adoption might reinforce rather than reduce existing inequalities in access and capability.

Digital Twins for Smart Rural Places

Digital twins — computational replicas of physical systems fed by real-time sensor data — have transformed infrastructure planning in large cities. This project asks whether the same tools can be made to work in small towns and rural communities, where technical capacity is limited, resources are constrained, and the social dynamics of sensor deployment are very different from urban contexts.

FEW-Meter

Urban agriculture has attracted considerable enthusiasm as a sustainability strategy, but rigorous cross-site evidence about its actual performance — in terms of food production, energy use, water consumption, and carbon impact — has been scarce. FEW-Meter was designed to fill that gap. Bringing together research teams from the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Poland, the project developed and applied a standardized accounting methodology to measure food, energy, and water flows across urban farms of varying types and scales.

GLO-FORCE: Urban Food Systems Resilience

Food supply chains in urban regions are highly vulnerable to sudden disruption — as demonstrated by the 2025 EF3 tornado that struck the St. Louis metropolitan area, exposing gaps in local food distribution and emergency response networks. GLO-FORCE responds to this challenge by integrating three emerging technologies — blockchain for supply chain transparency, artificial intelligence for predictive analytics, and geospatial intelligence for spatial situational awareness — into a unified decision-support framework for food system resilience.

Signals for Understanding Wyoming Water and Fire Futures

Communities and land managers in Wyoming’s Wind River Basin face an increasingly volatile environment — one where the timing of snowmelt, the frequency of drought, and the behavior of wildfire are shifting in ways that challenge established planning practices. Responding effectively requires more than better scientific forecasts: it requires infrastructure for translating those forecasts into decisions, and for ensuring that the knowledge informing those decisions reflects both scientific evidence and the Indigenous knowledge and other local knowledge held by communities in the basin.

Smart Rural Places

Exploring the role of smart systems and artificial intelligence in rural places and small towns.

The Impact of Wildfire Smoke on Tourism in the GYE

Wildfire smoke is an increasingly visible consequence of a changing climate in the American West, and few places experience its effects more acutely than the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Home to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks and surrounded by gateway communities whose economies depend heavily on outdoor recreation, the GYE draws millions of visitors each year — visitors who are sensitive to air quality conditions that affect visibility, health, and the quality of outdoor experience.

The Geography of Social Vulnerability and Wildfire Risk across Wyoming

Wildfire is Wyoming’s most prevalent disaster: since 1980, fires have accounted for more than 68% of all disaster declarations in the state, and recent seasons have broken historical records for acres burned. But the impacts of wildfire are not evenly distributed. Populations with fewer economic resources, limited mobility, or reduced access to social support face compounded risks — both greater exposure and diminished capacity to prepare, evacuate, and recover. Understanding where those populations live, and where their locations overlap with the highest fire hazard, is essential for targeting mitigation resources where they are most needed.

Stylized Facts for the Circular Economy

The circular economy literature has grown rapidly over the past decade, but its findings remain scattered across disciplines, geographies, and methodological traditions — making it difficult for policymakers and practitioners to know what is actually established versus what is contested or context-dependent. This project addresses that gap through the concept of “stylized facts”: concise, empirically grounded propositions that distill what is reliably known about a system into a form that is both rigorous and usable.

Urban Symbiosis

Urban Symbiosis developed and empirically grounded a new concept in urban sustainability: urban symbiosis, defined as the mutually beneficial, citizen-led sharing of materials and resources within cities. Drawing on industrial symbiosis as an intellectual precedent but reorienting it toward citizen agency and social exchange, the project argued that resource circularity in cities is driven as much by social motivations as environmental ones.

talks

teaching