IRES Student Seminar with Chloë Chang and Aloy Kouzak Campos da Paz

Talk summary:

If I show you, a farmer, areas of your field that aren’t making, or are even losing money, would you do something about it? Profit maps are a heat map-like visual that use tractor or satellite imagery-based yield data plus costs and revenues to show how profit varies at the sub-field scale. They highlight marginal areas, or field sections with poor yield/profit, that simultaneously contribute most to environmental problems and offer extraordinary potential for restored habitat or alternative management practices. In partnership with farmers and diverse stakeholders, we evaluate the potential utility of this tool for instigating management change across geospatial, economic, psychological, conservation, and agronomic disciplines.

Chloë Chang, IRES MSc Student

Bio:

Chloë Chang (she/her/elle) is in the IRES MSc program in the Three E’s Lab, supervised by Dr. Joséphine Gantois. Chloë completed a BSc honours in Wildlife Biology and Conservation with a minor in Agriculture at the University of Guelph. After working and researching within wildlife conservation and ecology, as well as diverse agricultural production systems, Chloë is passionate about aligning these two disciplines. Chloë’s research at IRES explores how farmers’ field management decisions may be impacted by profit-mapping, a precision agriculture/GIS innovation, in Southern Ontario.

Talk summary:

Achieving a fast and just energy transition requires us to consider energy emissions, geographic context, and socioeconomic wellbeing together. Identifying municipal typologies (i.e. groups of municipalities with similar characteristics) could help policymakers target interventions more effectively. However, policies typically differentiate target groups using simple thresholds, perhaps due to the difficulty of accounting for complex, multidimensional contexts. This thesis explores how machine learning methods can support more nuanced policy targeting. Using PCA and K-means clustering, I analyse 150+ municipalities in British Columbia based on energy consumption and emissions, geographical context, and socioeconomic wellbeing. I find that municipalities cluster strongly by geographic context (remoteness, latitude) but more weakly by energy-wellbeing characteristics.

 Aloy Kouzak Campos da Paz, IRES MSc Student

Bio:

Aloysio (Aloy) Kouzak Campos da Paz (he/him) is an M.Sc. student at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, co-supervised by Dr. Naoko Ellis and Dr. Bhushan Gopaluni. Born in Brazil, Aloy came to UBC for Electrical Engineering—though he flirted with economics, architecture, philosophy, and psychology. After exploring through roles from designing laboratory equipment at the Quantum Matter Institute to sustainability due diligence at Sierra Wireless, he discovered he is energized by innovation and challenges with social-ecological impact. His Master’s lets him pursue these interests together: using engineering tools to analyze data and create solutions for problems rooted in economics, social sciences, and ecology.