About

Mitchell A. Pavao-Zuckerman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Science & Technology at the University of Maryland. He leads the Urban and Built Environment Sustainability Lab, which links ecology, design, policy, and technologies to address urban environmental challenges and foster adaptation and resilience to climate change. His research focuses on ecosystem services provided by soils, plants, and biogeochemistry within green infrastructure and urban ecosystems, investigating how these elements function and contribute to ecosystem services in various settings such as Baltimore, MD, and Washington, DC. He employs a combination of field and laboratory techniques to study soil quality, microbial activity, biogeochemical processes, and ecophysiological responses. Dr. Pavao-Zuckerman's work includes examining the role of urban forests and trees in stormwater management, particularly their capacity to reduce runoff through transpiration. He measures tree transpiration using sensors to quantify their impact on urban hydrology, comparing different tree species and urban settings. Additionally, he explores agrivoltaics, a hybrid ecotechnology that co-locates photovoltaic solar power with agricultural systems, assessing its ecosystem services, energy production, and barriers to adoption. His research demonstrates the benefits of agrivoltaics in improving crop production, reducing water demand, and increasing solar power efficiency, supported by significant grants such as a $1.2 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy. Dr. Pavao-Zuckerman collaborates on projects assessing stakeholder perceptions and barriers to implementing sustainable urban and agricultural solutions.

Selected publications

• Editorial: Green infrastructure: Evolution and current state

  Urban forestry & urban greening · 2025-03-12 · 3 citations

  editorialSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Internet of Things‐Based Framework Application at a University Campus Scale: Linking Smart Monitoring Systems and Stormwater Management

  Advanced Intelligent Discovery · 2025-06-04 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Urban stormwater management is increasingly a challenge due to land use change, aging infrastructure, and climate‐driven precipitation variability. Likewise, maintaining regulatory compliance for stormwater permits is becoming more difficult. This study develops and deploys stormwater sensors using an Internet of Things‐based monitoring framework on the University of Maryland campus, a spatially compact but land use diverse testbed, designed to support both compliance and adaptive planning. Across three campus outfalls for stormwater quantity and quality data collection, the study investigates how hyperlocal precipitation and catchment characteristics affect stormwater flow and identifies key patterns in stormwater flow and quality through continuous monitoring. Findings reveal correlations between runoff behaviors and catchment characteristics (i.e., imperviousness) and highlight site‐specific associations between runoff flow and water quality indicators (pH, turbidity, conductivity, and dissolved oxygen). These associations can be leveraged as indicators of flood and pollution risk for management and planning purposes. This study also explores the role of campus stakeholders in guiding a “smart” system design, deployment, and big data use and outlines adaptive and preventive strategies for mitigating field deployment challenges and optimizing system performance that is a practical, compliance‐oriented model for smart stormwater monitoring in complex urban settings at various scales.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cultivating engagement: Public participation in agrivoltaics planning and design

  Energy Research & Social Science · 2025-09-01 · 2 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Investigating Social-Ecological Linkages in Baltimore, MD: Environmental Stewardship, Green Stormwater Infrastructure, and Tree Canopy Change at the Neighborhood Level

  Cities and the Environment · 2024-11-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Environmental stewardship organizations in Baltimore play important roles in taking care of the local environment through conservation, management, restoration, monitoring, education, and other efforts. These diverse activities were captured in Baltimore’s Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project (STEW-MAP) surveys in 2011 and 2019. Despite previous research, knowledge gaps remain about the spatial and temporal dynamics of environmental stewardship groups and their relationships with elements of the built environment, such as green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) and tree canopy cover. Using spatial Bayesian regression, we examine how 1) voluntary GSI, 2) regulatory GSI, 3) tree canopy cover, and 4) tree canopy cover change vary by the number of local stewardship organizations related to stormwater management or trees, with and without controlling for impervious surface cover, median household income, race, ethnicity, and vacant housing. Voluntary GSI represents bottom-up community initiatives and was expected to be more strongly predicted by stewardship than regulatory GSI, which is implemented in a top-down manner by City agencies. Tree canopy cover and canopy change are the product of both bottom up and top-down tree planting, protection, and maintenance activities. Overall, the number of stewardship groups from either point in time was not a significant predictor of tree canopy or GSI of either type. However, 2011 tree stewardship groups were positively associated with tree canopy gain from 2013 to 2018, and 2019 tree stewardship groups were slightly negatively associated with tree canopy change. Adjusted models showed impervious surface was positively related to voluntary GSI, median household income was positively associated with tree canopy cover, and percent Black/African American was negatively associated with regulatory GSI. The findings raise questions about how stewardship activities are quantified and mapped, and the other plausible mechanisms that explain the spatial distribution of GSI and tree canopy cover. More long-term quantitative data, augmented with qualitative, engaged and process-based inquiry might be needed to more holistically understand local stewardship motivations and actions and the potential outcomes of the myriad groups who care for their neighborhoods.

  PublisherDOI

• GIS-based spatial approaches to refining urban catchment delineation that integrate stormwater network infrastructure

  Discover Water · 2024-05-13 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Rapid urbanization and escalating climate change impacts have heightened stormwater-related concerns (e.g., pluvial flooding) in cities. Understanding catchment dynamics and characteristics, including precise catchment mapping, is essential to accurate surface water monitoring and management. Traditionally, topography is the primary data set used to model surface water flow dynamics in undisturbed natural landscapes. However, urban systems also contain stormwater drainage infrastructure, which can alter catchment boundaries and runoff behavior. Acknowledging both natural and built environmental influences, this study introduces three GIS-based approaches to enhance urban catchment mapping: (1) Modifying DEM elevations at inlet locations; (2) Adjusting DEM elevations along pipeline paths; (3) Applying the QGRASS plug-in to systematically incorporate infrastructure data. Our evaluation using the geographical Friedman test (p > 0.05) and Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC = 0.80) confirms the statistical and spatial consistency among the studying methods. Coupled with onsite flow direction validation, these results support the feasibility and reliability of integrating elements of nature and built infrastructure in urban catchment mapping. The refined mapping approaches explored in this study offer improved and more accurate and efficient urban drainage catchment zoning, beyond using elevation and topographic data alone. Likewise, these methods bolster predictive stormwater management at catchment scales, ultimately strengthening urban stormwater and flooding resilience.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Interactions between management context and tree water use influence stormwater management potential of urban forests

  Urban forestry & urban greening · 2024-04-04 · 5 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Shifting paradigms in stormwater management – hydrosocial relations and stormwater hydrocitizenship

  Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning · 2023-01-23 · 9 citations

  article

  Stormwater management has recently begun a paradigm shift away from traditional top-down approaches in response to climatic changes, urbanization, and regulatory pressures. This paradigm shift is characterized by two key developments: the implementation of additional decentralized green infrastructure, and the practice of individuals managing stormwater from their privately-owned property. This transition involves redefining who is responsible for managing stormwater and the infrastructure used within stormwater management. Using insights from two urban watersheds, Watershed 263, Baltimore, MD and Watts Branch, Prince George’s County, MD and Washington, DC, where this shift is underway, we assess changes in the hydrosocial relationships underpinning this paradigm shift including the emergence of stormwater hydrocitizenship. We investigate stormwater hydrocitizenship as the role and responsibilities of individuals within stormwater management. We focus on the role of government at several levels, drawing insights from the concept of biopower. Our findings suggest that this paradigm shift and the emergence of a stormwater hydrocitizenship remains embedded in top-down governance, which in turn creates significant tension among different stakeholders. Arising from this critical analysis, we seek to promote a reimagining of how, where, and who manages stormwater towards more sustainable, resilient, and equitable outcomes.

  PublisherDOI

• Urbanization-Driven Anthropogenic and Environmental Factors Shape Soil Dissolved Organic Matter in Mangrove Ecosystems

  Ecosystem Health and Sustainability · 2023-11-21 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Mangrove ecosystems play a critical role in supporting ecological service values and regulating the global carbon cycle. They have become one of the most highly vulnerable ecosystems in the Anthropocene under the long-term influence of diverse human perturbations. Soil dissolved organic matter (DOM) is an active fraction within the carbon cycle in mangrove ecosystems. However, it remains unclear how human perturbations regulate DOM dynamics. Here, we used the fluorescence method and structural equation modeling to quantify the anthropogenic and environmental influence on soil DOM across the urban development gradient on a national scale in China. Anthropogenic activities (urban construction and sewage discharge) and environmental factors (salinity, metals, pH, and soil organic carbon) were striking forces that shaped DOM quality in mangrove soils. Both indirect and direct effects played critical roles in the soil DOM heterogeneity across the gradient of urbanization. Environmental factors can act as cofactors mediating human impact on DOM pools and as promoters transforming soil DOM in mangroves. Our study provided novel insights into the relationship between coastal developments and mangrove soil DOM heterogeneity and improved knowledge of coastal ecosystems as blue carbon sinks.

  PublisherDOI

• Stormwater Green Infrastructure Resilience Assessment: A Social-Ecological Framework for Urban Stormwater Management

  Water · 2023-05-06 · 18 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Urban areas are increasingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Stormwater Green infrastructure (SWGI) is seen as an approach to increase the climate resilience of urban areas, because they can buffer precipitation changes brought on by climate change. However, SWGI features themselves need to be resilient to climate change to be able to contribute to the resilience of cities. Thus, we aimed to develop a SWGI resilience assessment framework that could be used to identify challenges and to inform decisionmakers’ efforts to enhance resilience. We developed a resilience assessment framework based upon a resilience matrix approach to recognize effective resilience categories for SWGI by reviewing the literature on critical functionality and barriers to implementation and operation. These categories for SWGI included policy, design, maintenance, economic factors and social factors that influence SWGI functionality. We then identified specific aspects under each category that could be used for assessing SWGI resilience, recognizing that SWGI has critical functionalities and factors controlling its viability. Unlike other SWGI assessment frameworks that are focused on ecosystem services as a final outcome, we worked from a socio-ecological perspective in order to include socio-economic and policy factors and design and planning aspects that affect service provision. Developing a resilience assessment framework is critical for management because it can reveal the specific challenges facing SWGI resilience that have traditionally been overlooked, such as maintenance and social factors. This specific framework can also lead to efficient planning and management by identifying interrelations and hierarchical relationships of categories that influence resilience. Application of this framework will rely upon expert input to connect broad dimensions with specific indicators for SWGI to local priorities in resilience planning.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Defining Passive Green Infrastructure: An Ecosystem Services Perspective to Make It Count

  Journal of Sustainable Water in the Built Environment · 2022-03-16 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Forum papers are thought-provoking opinion pieces or essays founded in fact, sometimes containing speculation, on a civil engineering topic of general interest and relevance to the readership of the journal. The views expressed in this Forum article do not necessarily reflect the views of ASCE or the Editorial Board of the journal.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Labs

• Urban and Built Environment Sustainability LabPI

Awards & honors

• AGNR Awards
• Excellence in Extension Award
• Excellence in Instruction Award
• Excellence in Research Award