The stereotypical trappings of urban living -- fine restaurants, boutique shopping, amazing people-watching – need to accommodate one more city dweller: wildlife.

Cities are traditionally seen as places for people, but many species of wildlife thrive in urban areas. Interactions between humans and wildlife happen more often in urban areas than any other place on Earth. These interactions affect human health, safety and welfare, in both positive and negative ways.

Weather changes and the risks they pose are one of the biggest variables in agriculture. In many cases, farmers can reduce some of these risks by adapting their cropping practices to be more compatible with weather situations.

But not all farmers react to weather changes the same way. To better identify how farmers make weather-related decisions, two CHANS-Net researchers and their colleagues developed a framework to understand the causes and consequences of the decisions.

A new modeling framework will help managers estimate the effects of land use change and agricultural conservation practices on water quality.

The soil and water assessment tool (SWAT), was developed by CHANS-Net members Irem Daloglu, Joan Iverson Nassauer and Rick Riolo, as well as Donald Scavia. All the scientists are at the University of Michigan.

A group of CHANS-Net scientists have published in the journal Regional Environmental Change.  The release, below, is courtesy of The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, funded through a National Science Foundation grant to the University of Maryland. The CHANS-Net members are Nicholas R. Magliocca, Thomas K.