SCIENCE FOR SUSTAINABILITYOur research is motivated by the challenge of reducing adverse environmental impacts from provisioning energy, water, and food to a growing human population in a fast-changing world.
Directed by Dr. Rafael M. Almeida, the ECS Lab is housed in the School of Earth, Environmental, and Marine Sciences at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
We tackle multiple sustainability dimensions of water, energy, and food systems—both independently and jointly. Greenhouse gases and environmental change are common threads in our work.
Our methods combine diverse approaches, including ecological fieldwork, data science, statistical modeling, hydrological and geospatial analysis. We gain insights from analysis at local to global scales—from aquatic and agricultural ecosystems in South Texas to rivers and floodplains in the Amazon basin.
Read more about some focal themes of research in the ECS Lab below.
Strategic hydropower development
Hydropower is the world’s largest source of electricity, and dam construction will continue proliferating as global economies shift away from fossil fuels.
How can we balance social-ecological costs and energy benefits to inform better dam siting decisions? How will climate change affect future hydropower portfolios? How can greenhouse gas emissions from carbon-intensive hydropower dams be avoided or mitigated?
Floatovoltaics and agrivoltaics
Decarbonizing the global power sector will require the deployment of solar panels over vast areas worldwide. Two nascent solutions to reduce land-use conflicts of the solar revolution are to deploy solar panels over already converted land such as reservoirs, irrigation canals, and agricultural fields.
We are interested in evaluating multiple sustainability dimensions of ‘floatovoltaics’ and ‘agrivoltaics’, including GHG benefits, ecological advantages and risks, economic viability, and barriers to implementation. Where and under what conditions will floatovoltaics and agrivoltaics be more promising or challenging? How does shading from panels affect ecological processes in aquatic environments and agroecosystems?
Aquaculture sustainability
Aquaculture is the fastest-growing sector of the global food system, and farmed fish production already exceeds wild fish catch globally. We are especially interested in the expansion of freshwater aquaculture in biodiverse river basins such as the Amazon.
What drives emissions of greenhouse gases from aquaculture systems, and how do these emissions compare with those of other animal food sources? What practices and conditions could reduce the greenhouse-gas and land-use footprint of aquaculture? Which aquaculture species are most suitable to balance economic, nutritional and environmental objectives?