Capstone Project Published in Physical Geography

All MAS-GIS students must complete a capstone project during the summer eight-week session to fulfill the requirements of their one year accelerated master's degree. Many of the projects are related to work activities, involvement with a paid or unpaid internships, funded or unfunded research conducted with a faculty member, or topics of special interest to a student (even hobbies in some cases).

In spring of 2009, MAS-GIS student Camilo Cubaque from Bogota, Colombia was hired as a research assistant in the NSF-sponsored Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC). His project with DCDC involved estimating future residential water use across Phoenix given expected changes in climate over the next five decades. He found that water use in some census tracts had a high climate sensitivity while in other tracts, the residential water consumption was not at all sensitive to variations in climate. Sure enough, the high-end water users with high incomes, large lots, swimming pools, and irrigated landscaping were most sensitive to variations in climate while the low-end users with less income, smaller lots, no swimming pools, and no irrigated landscaping were insensitive to climate.

Camilo examined predictions from climate models for the Phoenix area for a period centered on 2050; given expected changes in atmospheric composition (e.g., the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases), all models predicted that Phoenix would warm, but the models predicted everything from more rain to less rain to no change whatsoever in the local rainfall amounts. He used these climate predictions to estimate future residential water use by census tracts in the city and ultimately produced the color maps used in the article. While residential water use will increase by 3% overall in response to a warmer climate, he found that the change in water use varied from 0% to nearly 13% across the city.

Camilo submitted the work to a highly recognized and respected professional scientific journal (Physical Geography), he survived the rigorous peer-review process, and the article appeared in recently in Volume 30, Number 4, pp. 308-323. Camilo has returned to Colombia and is currently working for an important governmental agency named ICFES. Also, he is helping with the Universidad del Rosario with some GIS classes in the Ekistics program. Moreover, he was involved in the ESRI Latin American Conference organized in Bogota Colombia in October/2009, and he had a booth that offered the MAS-GIS program at Arizona State University. In short, Camilo is working for his country now, and he is trying to use his work experience at the DCDC to improve his GIS skills, and make South America a place where GIS is used to solve different social problems.