This month's guest is someone close to home for our team- meet Alysha's PhD student, Negin Shamsi! Negin gives an overview of her first first-author publication, titled, "Interdependency classification: a framework for infrastructure resilience."

Shamsi's research focus is infrastructure and urban resilience. Infrastructure managers collaborate across engineering, urban planning, emergency response, policy making and more. The goal of Shamsi's research, including the new paper, is to better prepare all of these fields for disturbances from hurricanes to cyber attacks.

"These systems do not function in isolation, they are interdependent and if one system fails, it will have effects on other systems as well," she said. "When we talk about interdependencies, especially in the past, people think about vulnerabilities, cascading failures- something negative. But recently, there has been a changing perspective: we can look at them as an opportunity for collaboration and innovation."

Check out the new paper here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2634-4505/adac89/pdf

Negin's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/negin-shamsi-b6736b160/

How big does an urban garden need to be to support pollinators and other important insects? What kinds of plants lead to the most biodiverse space? How should homeowners manage their gardens to support the natural world?

Get the full garden scoop with PhD researcher Joeri Morpurgo, from University Leiden in the Netherlands! Morpurgo and his colleagues visited urban gardens throughout Amsterdam and counted all the different plant and insect species they could find.

Some key findings? Gardens can be small but mighty--as long as there's dense foliage and a plethora of plant species, they supported a variety of insect species. And one controversial finding: native vs. non-native plant species didn't seem to make a difference to insect diversity.

Hear Morpurgo's take on his findings, and his urban garden management recommendations on the podcast!

Related links:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1618866724003297

https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2024/07/pavement-gardens-are-crucial-to-urban-biodiversity

Big, leafy shade trees, burbling creeks, and access to recreation in beautiful natural areas: most people intuitively know that these kinds of natural amenities create pleasant communities, and houses located close to these kinds of resources tend to sell for more than those without. What folks often aren't thinking about is the fact that these resources have other benefits too--including filtering stormwater, sequestering carbon, and cooling neighborhoods. But how can we use policy to help encourage developers to adopt these policies from the start? And how can policy backfire in helping create equitably distributed natural resources for communities?

Michael Drescher, Associate Professor in the School of Planning and Adam Skoyles, PhD student at the University of Waterloo, joined host Alysha Helmrich to discuss these questions and more.

Drescher is the Director of the Residential Development Impact Scorecard for the Environment (RISE) project, which "Aims to better understand the longer-term impacts of urban residential developments on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and seeks to measure the effectiveness of GHG mitigation efforts of green infrastructure." Learn more about how RISE is working to help institute permanent changes in the development sector through their scorecard on the podcast!