Research

* please feel free to email me for any PDFs of my publications if you are unable to access them

Letters of Map Change on Flood Insurance Rate Maps

The only peer-reviewed journal article published from this work can be found here.

My dissertation for the University of Oregon (which includes other unpublished work on this topic) can be downloaded at the link below.

Using quantitative analyses supplemented with technical expert interviews and policy document review, I have worked with Sarah Pralle at Syracuse University to analyze where high hazard flood zones on maps used to set insurance premiums for the United States National Flood Insurance Program have been changed by resident initiatives called Letters of Map Change. I have analyzed the relationship between occurrences of these changes and socio-demographic characteristics of places and found home values are often higher and populations more proportionately white where changes are more frequent, suggesting there is inequitable ability to access Letters of Map Change.

Developing a generalizable and probabilistic method to quantify uncertainty when measuring channel planform change from image time series

I played a more minor role in this project, but I teamed with Christy Leonard and Jack Schmidt (both at Utah State) as well as Carl Legleiter (USGS) to develop a spatially distributed probabilistic method capable of quantifying the spatial distribution of uncertainty from co-registration error and digitization for both linear channel adjustments and polygons of erosion and deposition. The related paper is here. Accompanying tools, information, and data can be found here and here.