Schedule of Workshops and Topics to be Covered

Unless otherwise specified, all capstone workshops will be online over Zoom and will run on Fridays from 5:00 – 6:30pm. The drafted schedule will be shared soon. Workshops, like a class, are required in addition to meeting with your teams at least twice per month.

Projects on Offer

1. Understanding and Predicting Dzud Events and Their Impacts in Middle and High Latitude Drylands

Led by Professor Kyle McDonald (Earth and Atmospheric Sciences)

Objective:
Students will characterize dzud event risk and severity, assessing relationships between remote sensing datasets (e.g. soil moisture, vegetation stress, landscape freeze/thaw state), dzud events, and associated socioeconomic impacts. Based on this analysis, students will develop an assessment framework for use in risk mitigation strategies. The understanding gained supports integration of physical and social sciences into decision making for anticipatory action.

Background:
Drylands in the middle and high latitudes have harsh environments with characteristically cold and arid climates. The livelihoods of the people inhabiting these areas are threatened by constant climate-related natural hazards. Dzud is the Mongolian term for a natural disaster resulting from harsh winter conditions that reduce availability or accessibility of pastures, leading to an extensive loss of livestock/wildlife from either starvation or cold during the winter-spring. These events occur in grasslands and tundra in significant portions of the mid to high latitudes, covering approximately 45% of Earth’s terrestrial area. In Central Asia, these events have significant humanitarian impacts because they affect local livestock populations, especially in Mongolia where approximately 30% of the workforce is dependent on herding for a substantial part of their livelihoods. In North America, these events are called winter kill, and they can result in massive die-offs of wildlife.

The current dzud early warning system in Mongolia has been in place since 2015 and is developed by the Information and Research Institute of Meteorology, Hydrology and Environment (Mongolia) in collaboration with Nagoya University in Japan. However, fully characterizing summer and winter conditions associated with dzud risk has been a challenge, and false positives associated with prediction of dzud events are high.

This capstone study seeks to employ state-of-the-art remote sensing datasets collected from Earth orbit to develop risk and severity assessments for dzud events and associated socioeconomic impacts to inhabitants of dzud-prone regions. Initial emphasis will be on the dryland steppe of Mongolia where records of dzud events are available. Extension to other parts of the terrestrial high latitudes will include analysis of die-off events in North America.

Suggested Approaches:

1. (i)  Investigate the relationship between dzud event occurrence, non-frozen season soil moisture (SM)conditions, vegetation water stress, and winter/autumn/spring freeze/thaw (FT) state conditions using remote sensing datasets, ground-based station data, and dzud occurrence data. NASA’s Soil Moisture Active-Passive (SMAP) mission provides SM and land surface FT state datasets beginning in 2015. NASA’s ECOSTRESS mission provides vegetation water stress and precision thermal data characterizing surface temperature for approximately the last three years. Explore the role of FT timing and past summer SM for different vegetation zones in Mongolia.
2. (ii)  Produce remote sensing-informed dzud risk maps based on prior summer soil moisture, current freeze/thaw state conditions, and ancillary datasets through an analysis conducted in a GIS framework supporting multi-criteria decision analysis.
3. (iii)  Extend results to the regions of the global middle and high latitudes.
4. (iv)  Conduct risk and socioeconomic impact assessments.

Students should be comfortable working with computer analysis tools and a GIS analysis framework.

This project will be carried out in collaboration with scientists from the Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems group in the Division of Science at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California.

2. An analysis of the economic and environmental impact of the U.S. EPA’s Brownfields and Land Revitalization programs in New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. 

Led by Professor Angelo Lampousis (Earth and Atmospheric Sciences)

Objective

Perform research evaluating the costs for environmental assessments, site characterization, and ultimate clean up and remediation of New York’s and New Jersey’s most contaminated sites.  Make recommendations for prioritizing the selection of candidate sites for environmental clean-up and redevelopment based on the estimated benefits in the annual household income of communities surrounding these sites.  

Background

A brownfield is a property where expansion, redevelopment or reuse may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant or contaminant.  

EPA’s Brownfields Program supports land revitalization by providing grants and technical assistance to help communities clean up and sustainably reuse brownfield sites. The program distributes funds appropriated annually by Congress through competitive grants, non-competitive funding and technical assistance.

EPA’s Land Revitalization Program goes beyond site assessment and cleanup to support local community efforts to identify practical reuse options, remove barriers to site reuse, integrate sustainable and equitable approaches and attract resources. Land revitalization includes several different types of site reuse planning activities that can help communities understand local market conditions, financial feasibility and site design reuse scenarios.

This project will begin by analyzing the history of EPA funding in New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands and its economic and environmental impact effect on the surrounding communities. Finally, the study will focus on specific sites, and for each will propose site design reuse scenarios. 

Suggested Approaches

Understand the science of Phase I and Phase II environmental site assessments, site characterization, environmental clean-up and remediation. Create visualizations of the economic and environmental impact of the U.S. EPA’s Brownfields program in New York and New Jersey over time using GIS.

Identify practical reuse options, remove barriers to site reuse, integrate sustainable and equitable approaches and attract resources.

Pre-requisites/Ideal Team

The ideal team would be interdisciplinary including environmental engineering, architecture, economics, planning, and policy. Students would be expected to take Environmental Site Assessment courses. 

Recommended Reading

• ASTM E1527-21 Standard Practice for Environmental Site Assessments: Phase I Environmental Site Assessment Process
• ASTM E1903-19 Standard Practice for Environmental Site Assessments: Phase II Environmental Site Assessment Process
• The Brown Agenda by Richard Fuller and Damon DiMarco. 

3. Climate Justice and Urban Heat in NYC

Led by Zihao Zhang (Landscape Architecture)

Objective

This research investigates the intersection of climate justice and urban design/planning in cities such as New York, with a specific focus on extreme heat as a critical urban climate challenge. The project aims to generate insights and actionable recommendations for policymakers, practitioners, and community stakeholders seeking to mitigate heat vulnerability and advance climate justice in densely populated, diverse urban environments.

Background

This project continues the “Climate Justice” capstone series launched in 2023.

• 2023–24 team examined climate justice through literature review, public forums, community advisory groups, and expert dialogues, with special attention to decoloniality, community engagement, and climate gentrification.
• 2024–25 team focused on green roofs as a climate adaptation strategy in New York City, exploring their potential through policy, technology, and design lenses.

Building on this foundation, the 2025–26 research team will foreground extreme heat as a pressing and inequitable hazard. Rising temperatures disproportionately impact low-income communities, immigrants, and communities of color, who often face limited access to cooling infrastructure, shaded public space, or political representation.

By examining how urban design decisions and planning frameworks can either reduce or exacerbate heat risks, this project will deepen understanding of climate justice in New York City. It will also contribute to the Department of Energy–funded Resilience Lighthouse project, offering students opportunities to collaborate with climate scientists working on the frontlines of adaptation.

Approaches / Methods

• Literature review of climate justice, urban heat vulnerability, and adaptation strategies.
• Community engagement through public forums to document lived experiences of extreme heat and cooling inequities.
• Expert interviews with policymakers, practitioners, climate scientists and scholars focused on heat resilience, housing, and public health.
• Geospatial analysis and GIS-based story mapping to visualize spatial patterns of heat exposure, vulnerability, displacement, and resilience.

4. Harlem Retrofit Lab and Design Partnership (Phase V)

Led by Michael Bobker, Director of the CUNY Building Performance Lab

Objective

The overall goal of this project is to develop a connected energy community through a technology/leadership organization – Harlem Community Energy – that will promote energy reliability, resiliency, efficiency, and carbon reduction, with community engagement and benefits, deploying retrofit technologies and follow-on management for a low-carbon and grid-interactive Harlem neighborhood. 

The project will provide a replicable template for district-scale energy services in dense urban neighborhoods. In addition to technical feasibility and benefits, the project will model organizational relationships incorporating major institutions, community organizations, utility companies, and city government.  

A key objective is to operationalize concepts such as Deep Energy Retrofit and Virtual Power Plant, making them accessible and useful for community planning and outreach.  Each successive capstone team’s objective is to learn from and build upon previous teams’ work, making definable incremental progress while also providing the basis for next steps by teams that will follow.  In this process students will be exposed to real-world challenges, cutting-edge concepts, and applications of great value in professional practice and community energy planning.  

Background

The project is a multi-year effort under the auspices of the CCNY Harlem Retrofit Lab, founded and led by Michael Bobker. To date, four rounds of capstone teams have articulated deep energy retrofit technologies and technology packages for typical apartment buildings and rowhouses, incorporating Passive House envelopes, heat recovery, EV charging, energy storage, and heat pump electrification. Retrofits would incorporate sensors and controls for coordinated interaction with the electric grid, applying the concepts of GEB (Grid-interactive Energy-efficient Buildings) and DERMS (Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems) as currently under development and piloting at US DOE National Labs. The intent is that this knowledge can be communicated to support property owners in their decision-making and planning. Financing sources have been investigated but investment performance remains a major challenge. Community engagements have been initiated and a funding proposal developed albeit to date unsuccessful. 

Suggested Approaches / Next Step Options

The Capstone Team will extend and deepen application concepts and relationships through one or more of the action-steps below, to be selected in discussion with the project mentor.  

• Conduct technology-specific research, connecting with specialized designers and vendors 
• Investigate forms of incorporation and engage community leaders as potential members of a Board of Directors, including possible “university seminar”  
• Define a “Benefit Stack” including quantification of non-financial benefits.  
• Develop template project finance packages and training program for financial packagers
• Develop and use a District Energy Model, working with other university researchers 
• Develop community-oriented training programs specific to Deep Energy Retrofits and/or Virtual Power Plant operation and plan outreach to target audience(s)

5. Assessing Water Security in Ukraine:
Monitoring Changes in Fresh Water Resources and Associated Societal Impacts with Remote Sensing Datasets

Led by Prof. Kyle McDonald (Earth and Atmospheric Sciences)

Objective:
The objective of this project is to develop remote sensing-based assessments of fresh water resources in Ukraine from time periods extending from pre-conflict to the present, quantify changes in those resources resulting from the on-going war in Ukraine, and assess societal impacts associated with effects of the war on Ukraine’s water resources. Project efforts will focus on the Dnieper River basin and regions of conflict therein.

Background:
The current war in Ukraine drives an urgent need for actionable information to address response and recovery issues associated with damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure and environment. This includes assessments of damage to infrastructure associated with Ukraine’s fresh water resources. The Dnieper River basin provides Ukraine’s primary source of fresh water for human consumption and agricultural irrigation. Much of this water is stored (impounded) in reservoirs, ponds, and lakes., many of which are artificial, having been constructed in the 1960s. Individual water bodies range in size from a few to several hundred hectares. Remote sensing imagery from Earth-orbiting Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is well-suited to monitoring surface water and changes in surface water associated with such water bodies over broad regions. This project will employ remote sensing data from multiple sources to assess areal changes in lakes, ponds and reservoirs associated with the war in Ukraine, and relate this change to associated threats to Ukraine’s water security. Regional-specific analyses will consider changes in occupied territories and assessment of water use through census records.

Suggested Approaches:

1. Develop annual and seasonal maps of water reservoirs, lakes, and ponds using multiple sources of radar and optical remote sensing image data including SAR remote sensing imagery from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Sentinel-1 satellite, the Japanese space agency (JAXA) ALOS PALSAR and ALOS-2 PALSAR 2 satellites, and USGS Landsat and ESA Sentinel-2 satellites.
2. Using these remote sensing products, assess distribution and change in distribution of reservoirs, lakes, and ponds across multiple years extending from pre-conflict time periods to the present.
3. Assess societal impacts related to, e.g., water resources for consumptive use and irrigation, associated with the war in Ukraine.
4. Assess improvements to remote sensing products provided by the NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR) satellite (https://nisar.jpl.nasa.gov/) as datasets come available \ after its operation begins (presently expected before the end of 2024), and from NASA’s Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite (https://swot.jpl.nasa.gov/), launched in December 2022.

Remote sensing analyses will be carried out using tools available on-line, such as ESA’s SNAP toolbox, Google Earth Engine, and QGIS. Students should be comfortable working with or motivated to learn computer analysis tools and a GIS analysis framework to support analysis of remote sensing data.

This project will be carried out in collaboration with scientists from the NATO Climate Change and Security Center of Excellence (CCASCOE), Montreal, Canada, and the Earth Science Section in the Division of Science at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California.

6. Local NYC Drought Impacts for Local NYC Response Policy Development

Faculty: Nir Krakauer (Civil Engineering) 

Client Organization/Key Collaborators:  Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, NYC DEP, NYC DOHMH, NYC Parks; plus Town+Gown:NYC project facilitation services

Background: NYC faces the potential of drought conditions for its water supply system, which draws water from upstate,  but drought conditions also occur in NYC itself.

Objective:  The City is looking for a thorough review of observed and potential drought impacts in New York City (excluding the effect of drought in the City water supply), including localized impacts on green space, green infrastructure, air quality, urban natural systems, and others.  While the City has other efforts ongoing about regional water supply issues and drought, it is thinking about local impacts on a broader range of services and infrastructure. 

Tasks (Including Data): Data sources could include observations from past droughts, data on green infrastructure performance and maintenance, tree canopy coverage data, heat and air quality observations, public health metrics, etc.  It would be helpful to see case studies of other drought-affected cities for proposed intervention strategies before, during, and after periods of drought to mitigate observed harms.  Town+Gown:NYC can make connections for interviews in Los Angeles, where drought conditions have manifested within Los Angeles in addition to its various water supply areas.

Deliverables:  Final report with recommendations 

7. Feasibility Study of CCNY Shuttle Extension to Metro-North

Led by Katherine Gloede Silverman (Urban Sustainability)

Objective:
The objective of this project is to look at the existing conditions and costs of CCNY’s shuttle bus service to/from 125th and 145th Street Subway Stations and determine feasibility, cost, potential Return on Investment, and carbon footprint reduction of extending shuttle service to the Metro-North Station at 125th Street.

Background:
The current CCNY Shuttle bus service runs during the regular semester from 6AM-10PM between 125th Street A,B,C,D trains through campus on Convent Avenue to 145th Street A,B,C,D trains. This service is used by thousands of student, staff, and faculty riders each week to make campus more Accessible from a larger number of trains. Still, many in our CCNY community rely on Metro-North Service to 125th Street to get to campus. This is a long walk and, particularly in bad weather, leads to more people driving to campus. Campus parking resources are burdened and this is an unsustainable option (with some exceptions). Furthermore, campus shuttle service does not have a way for students to see shuttle location or time until arrival. With a tracking device added and live updates, user friendliness and appeal could cause a gain in significant popularity. These, alongside extension, could provide CCNY with a new, green campus recruitment mechanism for additional students (and especially graduate students) who live outside the City but want to engage with Campus.

Suggested Approaches:

1. Complete a current picture of the Campus Shuttle as is, including challenges and hiccups and regular service, staffing practices, and average usage with some help from CCNY Facilities. This may require an on campus transportation study. Parking resources and use should be included as well.
2. Propose a plan of implementing Shuttle tracking so students can access current Shuttle location and develop an advertising campus for the Shuttle as Sustainable CCNY resource.
3. Conduct a feasibility study on extending the Shuttle service (and perhaps adding one Shuttle) to Metro-North hourly. Determine costs and potential Return on Investment in the form of new students and/or freed up parking resources.
4. Many recommendations to the Campus to improve existing Shuttle service user experience and a plan to extend service to Metro-North at 125th Street.

Notes: This project will contain in person components. At least half or 2/3rds of the team should be in person or hybrid students. Fully online students and/or students with lengthy commutes, in place of in person transportation studies, may be asked to complete some additional work or take the lead on paper writing.

8. NISAR Mission Science and Applications for a Sustainable Earth: Unveiling the Changing Earth with Synthetic Aperture Radar

Led by Professor Kyle McDonald (Earth and Atmospheric Sciences)

Objective:
The objective of this project is to define approaches and develop methodologies for applying
imaging radar remote sensing datasets from the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR)
mission to advance sustainability goals. A joint mission between NASA and the Indian Space
Research Organization (ISRO), NISAR was launched on July 30, 2025, from the Satish Dhawan
Space Centre in Sriharikota, India, carrying a state-of-the-art imaging radar instrument package
designed to study the changing Earth environment. NISAR radar datasets support science and
applications community needs for characterizing terrestrial ecosystems, the cryosphere, and solid
Earth processes. This capstone project will define and develop approaches that employ NISAR
datasets to advance sustainable development and issues of societal relevance. Considering the
unique capabilities of NISAR, the capstone team will define how to employ these data, alone and
in combination with other data sources, considering NISAR’s societal relevance to address, for
example, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and other issues of societal
relevance.

Background:
The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission is providing large-scale imaging
radar data sets of Earth surface dynamics that are critical to characterization of Earth’s terrestrial
ecosystems, cryosphere, and solid Earth deformation. NISAR is the first NASA SAR mission to
enable systematic and consistent time-series active microwave observations suitable for
monitoring land surface structure and dynamics globally. NISAR’s mission science objectives
embrace such needs as the characterization of vegetation biomass, wetlands ecosystems
inundation, land cover disturbance, and agricultural activity. NISAR will also advance
characterization of the cryosphere (e.g. ice-sheet collapse and associated sea level rise) and of
natural hazards associated with surface deformation (e.g, landslides and permafrost degradation).
NISAR societal relevance has been articulated, in part, in a series of white papers authored by the
NISAR Science Team. NISAR datasets are presently being evaluated by the NISAR Operational
Science Team (OST) to ensure mission science objectives are addressed. Detailed information
concerning NISAR mission science and technical capabilities are provided in the NASA-ISRO
SAR (NISAR) Mission Science Users’ Handbook, Second Edition, available here.
Analyses will be carried out using tools such as Jupyter Notebooks, ESA’s SNAP toolbox, Google
Earth Engine, QGIS, and various custom analysis tools assembled by the NISAR OST. Students
should be comfortable working with or motivated to learn computer analysis tools and a GIS
analysis framework to support analysis of remote sensing and other geospatial data.
This project will be carried out in collaboration with scientists from the Earth Science Section in
the Division of Science at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of
Technology, Pasadena, California.

List of References:
NISAR (2025, version 1). NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR) mission science users’ handbook, second
edition. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 246 pp.
NISAR Mission Web Site: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/nisar/
NISAR Societal Benefits white papers: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/nisar/societal-benefits/
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: https://sdgs.un.org/goals

9. Uptown Urban Gardens

Led by Professors Michael Bobker (CUNY Building Performance Lab) and Zihao Zhang (Landscape Architecture)

Objectives: Students will develop the basis for an on-going program for work with urban gardens in Upper Manhattan and the Lower Bronx, starting with an exploration of urban garden history and activities in NYC and the potential role(s) of university programs.  Urban gardens are important to urban resilience along multiple dimensions, including heat island and flood mitigation, community social cohesion, public health, alternative food production and food distribution. Students will be expected to think creatively about long-term pathways that can engage community members from a university base.  The project’s goal is to establish a useful role or roles for a CCNY program in relation to local garden needs, including gardening on the campus itself.  Towards this end and with this being the first of a hoped-for continuing series of projects, students will develop and consider multiple options, comparing and contrasting at least two in detail for future development.  The project’s outcome should be a clear set of “next steps.”  

Background: Urban gardening has been a grass-roots movement in NYC communities, primarily lower income, since the 1970’s.  Descendants of this era are still active and have spawned many replications, tapping some deep root in community spirit and human desire to bond with the earth, even – or perhaps especially – in a highly built-out environment.  The diversity of urban garden forms is a testament to individual creativity and makes for delightful study but also makes programming a challenge.  Some programs, such as the Thunderbird Research Farm in the CAUSE program at the University of the District of Columbia, narrow down focus solely to urban agriculture.  In contrast, Operation Green Thumb of the NYC Dept of Parks, which supports over 1,000 gardens, making it the largest such program in the US, remains agnostic about the objectives of a garden, instead basing support on each group’s ability to maintain its physical space.  Urban gardens, which are largely but not exclusively run by volunteers, exist within the context of multiple non-profit organizations addressing specific topics around a regional food system.  

Suggested Approaches:  Students will use a variety of methods such as surveys, interviews, and participant observation to establish perceived-needs of various local gardens.  Students will review recent and on-going related work at CCNY and elsewhere. 

10. Characterizing Terrestrial Surface Hydrodynamics with Synthetic Aperture Radar: NISAR Mission Science Addressing Wetlands Inundation and Land Surface Freeze/Thaw State

Led by Professor Kyle McDonald (Earth and Atmospheric Sciences)
Objective:
This project will support Earth science associated with the NASA’s NISAR mission – an Earth-
orbiting satellite carrying imaging radar instruments and launched in July 2025. NISAR radar
datasets will support science community needs for characterizing terrestrial ecosystems, including
wetlands environments, vegetation biomass and disturbance, and agriculture. This capstone project
will develop, implement, and test workflows that are being employed to assess NISAR data to
ensure NISAR performance addresses NASA’s mandated science objectives for the NISAR
mission. Emphasis will be on monitoring inundated wetlands in inland and coastal environments,
and monitoring seasonal and ephemeral land surface freeze/thaw (FT) state and associated
processes in cold land regions. Suitability of NISAR algorithms for application to urban
greenspace may be considered. Societal impacts associated with utility of NISAR data may also
be assessed.

Background:
Launched on July 30, 2025, from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India, the NASA-
ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission is providing large-scale imaging radar data sets
of Earth surface dynamics that are critical to characterization of Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems.
NISAR is the first NASA SAR mission to enable systematic active microwave observations
suitable for monitoring land surface structure and dynamics globally. A primary objective of
NISAR science includes enhancing knowledge of ecosystem structure and dynamics to determine
environmental change and ecological impacts. Key components of mission objectives embrace the
thrust areas of this capstone effort: (1) determination of the extent of wetlands and the dynamics
of inundated areas, (2) the characterization of land surface freeze/thaw state, and (3) application
of NISAR data to societal relevance such as assessment of urban greenspace. NISAR datasets are
presently being evaluated by the NISAR Operational Science Team (OST) to ensure mission
science objectives are addressed, as described in the NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR) Mission Science
Users’ Handbook, Second Edition, available here.
This capstone project will be conducted in collaboration with members of the NISAR operational
science team and will emphasize development and implementation of workflows for classifying
and validating NISAR-based remote sensing datasets. Workflows will utilize python programming
in Jupyter notebooks. Workflows will be applied across a network of NISAR calibration-validation
test sites, will ingest NISAR radar images and site-specific in situ and ancillary validation datasets,
and perform quality assessments comparing the NISAR data with validation data. This may
include assessment of the suitability of NISAR ecosystems algorithms for application to urban
landscapes.

Remote sensing analyses will be carried out using tools such as Jupyter Notebooks, ESA’s SNAP
toolbox, Google Earth Engine, QGIS, and various custom analysis tools assembled by the NISAR
OST. Students should be comfortable working with or motivated to learn computer analysis tools
and a GIS analysis framework to support analysis of remote sensing data.
This project will be carried out in collaboration with scientists from the Earth Science Section in
the Division of Science at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of
Technology, Pasadena, California.

References:
NISAR (2025, version 1). NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR) mission science users’ handbook, second
edition. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 246 pp.
NISAR Mission Web Site: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/nisar/