Healthy Urban Stream Interdisciplinary Research

Healthy Urban Stream Interdisciplinary Researtch (HUSIR) lab is led by Runzi Wang, Assistant Professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) at the University of Michigan. Our research focus are 1) Community-scale green infrastructure design optimization. 2) Regional/Watershed-scale water quality management. 3) Continental-scale environmental change monitoring and projection.

We studied changes in natural and urban environments across space and over time, with the objective to drive positive change with ecological planning and design strategies. Combining technologies such as big data, machine learning, remote sensing, and spatial statistics, our primary research explores how land cover change and urban development pattern influence stream water quality and stormwater quality at the watershed basis, together with a variety of environmental, climatic and sociocultural factors. By applying interpretable data science to landscape architecture, the most innovative part of our research is to uncover the nonlinear relationships between environmental, technological and sociocultural dimensions of landscape systems.