Mitchell Pavao-Zuckerman

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…

Selected publications

• A ‘green’ chameleon: Exploring the many disciplinary definitions, goals, and forms of “green infrastructure”

  Landscape and Urban Planning · 2021-06-10 · 193 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  While the concept of green infrastructure (GI) is increasingly popular, definitions, terminology, and goals differ based on geographic and disciplinary context. This paper examines these differences through a three-part systematic review: 1) content analysis of academic GI review publications, 2) bibliometric review of academic publications focusing on GI and GI-associated terms, and 3) an online search for grey GI literature. Parsing out conceptualizations of GI, and the agendas they support, h…

  PublisherDOI

• Agency and governance in green infrastructure policy adoption and change

  Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning · 2021-04-02 · 43 citations

  article

  Green Infrastructure (GI) is being adopted in cities all around the world as a key piece of climate change adaptation and water management for local governments. Recognizing that there is increasingly a diversity of actors engaged in designing, implementing, and fostering GI policies, we aim to better understand how urban GI policies take shape over time. We draw from two bodies of scholarship – – agency in Earth System Governance and entrepreneurs in public policy scholarship -- to study the ag…

  PublisherDOI

• Rethinking Stormwater: Analysis Using the Hydrosocial Cycle

  Water · 2020-04-30 · 32 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Water management and governance continues to rely on the scientific and engineering principles of the hydrologic cycle for decision-making on policies and infrastructure choices. This over-reliance on hydrologic-based, technocratic, command-and-control management and governance tends to discount and overlook the political, social, cultural, and economic factors that shape water-society relationships. This paper utilizes an alternative framework, the hydrosocial cycle, to analyze how water and so…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The dynamics of land-sea-scape carbon flow can reveal anthropogenic destruction and restoration of coastal carbon sequestration

  Landscape Ecology · 2020-11-07 · 28 citations

  articleSenior author
  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…

  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

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