Georgina Sanchez

North Carolina State University | NCSU

In the United States, requirements for flood insurance, development restrictions, and federal buyout program eligibility rely on regulatory designation of hazardous zones, i.e., inside or outside the 100-year floodplain. Extensive research has investigated floodplain development patterns across different geographies, times, and scales, yet the impa...

Zoning regulates land use and intensity of urban development at the county and municipal level in the United States, promoting economic growth, community health, and environmental preservation. However, limited availability of zoning data at scale hinders regional assessments of regulations and coordinated resilience planning efforts. In this study...

Decades of human activities and fire suppression have adversely affected longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) ecosystems, which are home to high levels of diversity and endemism. These iconic ecosystems also now face challenges from urbanization and climate change, which will alter conservation outcomes over the remainder of the 21st century. To explore...

Accurate assessment of global river flows and stores is critical for informing water management practices, but current estimates of global river flows exhibit substantial spread and estimates of river stores remain sparse. Estimates of river flows and stores are hampered by uncertainties in land runoff, an unobserved quantity that provides water in...

Impacts of sea level rise will last for centuries; therefore, flood risk modeling must transition from identifying risky locations to assessing how populations can best cope. We present the first spatially interactive (i.e., what happens at one location affects another) land change model (FUTURES 3.0) that can probabilistically predict urban growth...

Several environmental policies strive to restore impaired ecosystems and could benefit from a consistent and transparent process—codeveloped with key stakeholders—to prioritize impaired ecosystems for restoration activities. The Clean Water Act, for example, establishes reallocation mechanisms to transfer ecosystem services from sites of disturbanc...

Land conversion and climate change are stressing freshwater resources. Riparian areas, streamside vegetation/forest land, are critical for regulating hydrologic processes and riparian buffers are used as adaptive management strategies for mitigating land conversion effects. However, our ability to anticipate the efficacy of current and alternative...

Floods are the leading cause of natural disaster damages in the United States, with billions of dollars incurred every year in the form of government payouts, property damages, and agricultural losses. The Federal Emergency Management Agency oversees the delineation of floodplains to mitigate damages, but disparities exist between locations designa...

Earth’s atmosphere is warming and the effects of climate change are becoming evident. A key observation is that both the average levels and the variability of temperature and precipitation are changing. Information and data from new technologies are developing in parallel to provide multidisciplinary opportunities to address and overcome the conseq...

Sea level rise and urbanization exert complex synergistic pressures on the provision of ecosystem services (ES) in coastal regions. Anticipating when and where both biophysical and cultural ES will be affected by these two types of coastal environmental change is critical for sustainable land-use planning and management. Biophysical (provisioning a...

Urbanization impacts ecosystem functions and services by fundamentally altering the balances between precipitation, water yield (Q), and evapotranspiration (ET) in watersheds. Accurate quantification of future hydrologic impacts is essential for national urban planning and watershed management decision making. We hypothesize that “hydrologic impact...

Urban growth and climate change together complicate planning efforts meant to adapt to increasingly scarce water supplies. Several studies have shown the impacts of urban planning and climate change separately, but little attention has been given to their combined impact on long-term urban water demand forecasting. Here we coupled land and climate...

Urban growth and climate change together complicate planning efforts meant to adapt to increasingly scarce water supplies. Several studies have independently examined the impacts of urban planning and climate change on water demand, but little attention has been given to their combined impact. Here we forecast urban water demand using a Geographica...

This three-decade long study was conducted in the Pearl River Delta (PRD), a rapidly urbanizing region in southern China. Extensive soil samples for a diverse land uses were collected in 1989 (113), 2005 (1384), 2009 (521), and 2018 (421) for heavy metals of As, Cr, Cd, Cu, Hg, Ni, Pb and Zn. Multiple pollution indices and Structural Equation Model...

Population growth and unrestricted development policies are driving low-density urbanization and fragmentation of peri-urban landscapes across North America. While private individuals own most undeveloped land, little is known about how their decision-making processes shape landscape-scale patterns of urbanization over time. We introduce a hybrid a...

Due to human-induced climate change, traditionally water-rich environments can no longer depend on stable patterns of freshwater supply. Climate scientists advise water managers to expect warmer temperatures, changes in the distribution and intensity of precipitation, and more prolonged droughts. Together with global climate forcings, rapidly expan...

Integrated land- and water-use planning is gaining attention as a means to inform more water-efficient development patterns. In this study, we coupled a land change model with a development-related water use model to explore alternative futures of continued urbanization and estimate the associated water demand across the rapidly growing region of t...

Over the last decade, Johns Island, SC has experienced unprecedented growth, threatening a set of unique natural and cultural resources that reflect the Island’s rich civil rights era history and a near-contiguous landscape of mixed forest types, wetlands, agricultural operations and marine waterways. City, county and state government, along with N...

Water availability is becoming more uncertain as human populations grow, cities expand into rural regions and the climate changes. In this study, we examine the functional relationship between water use and the spatial patterns of developed land across the rapidly growing region of the southeastern United States. We quantified the spatial pattern o...

In many parts of the U.S., population growth combined with continued demand for low-density housing is transforming the structure of peri-urban landscapes. Despite the substantial amount of privately owned land, the important decision-making roles that individual landowners play in shaping patterns of urbanization and landscape change is understudi...

In this study, spatial clustering techniques were used in combination with Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to characterize the relationships between in-stream health indicators and socioeconomic measures of communities. The study area is the Saginaw River Watershed in Michigan. Four measures of stream health were considered: the Index of Biologi...

The dynamics and relationships between society and nature are complex and difficult to predict. Anthropogenic activities affect the ecological integrity of our natural resources, specifically our streams. Further, it is well-established that the costs of these activities are born unequally by different human communities. This study considered the u...