Our Work Is Local, but Our Impact Is Global

The Texas Metro Observatory (TMO) is a communication and data platform dedicated to sharing information and ideas about Texas’s communities, understanding common problems related to urbanization processes in these communities, and developing solutions across the state’s metropolitan areas. 

The Texas Futures VR Experience project transformed results from several Planet Texas 2050-funded research projects into an immersive, entertaining, and educational VR experience. 

Texas Water Stories studied and produced narratives about water in Texas’ past, present, and future. The project illustrated the diverse symbolic ties between water, environmental perception, and environmental change due to the climate crisis and shows how water is a central element of human and other-than-human environmental relations.

We don’t all breathe the same air. Urban air pollution varies sharply owing to unevenly distributed pollution sources. While fine-scale spatial variation in air quality has profound implications for public health and environmental equity, air pollution measurements are routinely collected at only a few locations in every city.

Incidents of discrimination are a part of everyday life for young people of color, and although many studies document the negative effects of discrimination, we know almost nothing about how it influences health over time. How do experiences of bias and mistreatment play a part in creating racial and ethnic health disparities?

The goal of this project is to build an AI system using crowd-sourced data to help predict the health impacts of different neighborhood environments.  

This project examined how the cities of Houston and San Antonio are preparing for climate change and addressing existing environmental justice issues.z

The Urban Watershed Evolution project was a collaborative, multi-disciplinary approach toward understanding the impacts of urbanization on natural waterways within the Austin area to work towards establishing a framework for policies and governance that increased ecological and societal resilience in urban centers.

In order to study the effectiveness of using a blend of sensing technology like smartphone apps and wearable technology, self-reported surveys, and readily available group-level information (grades, attendance), our team developed a study to understand more about the social lives, sleep habits, physical activity levels, and academic performance of 1000 UT undergraduate students in the 2019-2020 school year.

The team originally planned an extension of the UT1000 study to examine the relationship between biological indicators of stress, perception of stress, life events, and lifestyle in UT undergrads. This project addressed these challenges by developing and deploying environmental home beacons, wearable activity bands, and smartphone-based surveys.