Lane Center undergraduates conduct summer research in the arts and sciences to highlight critical issues facing the American West today
Every summer, the Lane Center supports a flourishing research assistantship program for undergraduates. This investment in scholarship about the American West underscores what the Center is all about: rigorous undergraduate academic opportunities, a commitment to interdisciplinary study, and an apparatus by which young students can emerge from their Stanford education as future leaders of the American West. Facing challenges presented by climate change and an onslaught of extreme weather, the region demands of its stewards broad knowledge and a passion for preserving Western lands and communities. This is why, in collaboration with the office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE), the Lane Center offers such substantial research support for students engaging with critical issues facing the western United States, Canada, and Mexico.
Working under the guidance of Esther Conrad, the Lane Center’s research manager, and Bruce Cain, the Center’s faculty director, research assistants (RAs) pursue original projects with faculty, working part-time for a maximum of 10 hours per week during the school year and up to 40 hours per week during the summer. Students meet regularly with their mentors to discuss goals and plans. For undergraduates who wish to immerse themselves in the study of some aspect of the West, three types of projects are available: student-initiated, faculty-initiated, or pre-identified projects planned by the Center. Students often stay on for multiple quarters to continue their research projects or pursue investigations in different Western-related topics.
This year, the research projects fall into four broad categories: water and climate resilience; wildfire; energy and transportation; and arts and culture. The Lane Center-sponsored projects focus on the former three categories, as do the faculty-initiated projects related to drinking water quality and greenhouse gas removal. Finally, several students are working on self-designed projects in the ‘arts and culture’ category. Their research has taken shape in diverse forms, from a true crime podcast, to photographic and musical explorations of the West, to a study of the intersections between religion and politics in Mexico. In total, the Lane Center supported 21 research assistants over the summer of 2024, and each one will be presenting their work to faculty and peers at some point during fall quarter.
The Projects
Taken as a whole, the current projects illuminate vital aspects of the region’s environmental, health, equity and policy challenges, while elevating aspects of the West’s natural and cultural uniqueness. The research is summarized below, alongside reflections from the students about the meaning, purpose, and potential impact of their work.
Water and Climate Resilience
Two groups of students conducted investigations into how the American West is adapting to water scarcity and changing climate patterns. The first group, comprising Chloe Clement-Finkel and Marin Brant, looked at the incentives for landowners to transition away from agricultural use in order to conserve groundwater. Why this pressure to repurpose the land? “Significant overdraft has continued in California’s agricultural-dependent regions, which rely heavily on groundwater. Consistent over-pumping and droughts in the region have created an urgent need to transition to sustainable groundwater management,” explains Clement-Finkel. Over a decade ago, the state recognized the urgency Clement-Finkel describes, passing the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) in 2014. The legislation requires state basins to reach groundwater sustainability by 2040 or 2042, depending on the basin.
Given the large role agriculture plays in California’s economy, land use, and water use, the industry plays a crucial role in helping the state adjust to changing conditions. In many groundwater basins in California and across the West, reversing groundwater overdraft will require reducing agricultural water use. This project examines the design, incentives, and governance structures of programs that help incentivize farmers to repurpose agricultural land. The team aims to inform how groundwater managers might develop these programs.
Student research has revealed that funding from the state’s Multi-benefit Land Repurposing Program (MLRP) has allowed several basins to repurpose land in the following ways: through groundwater recharge, habitat restoration, less water-intensive agricultural practices, and land fallowing. In analyzing these practices and how they are implemented, researcher Marin Brant says that her team will be able to “provide groundwater managers with important details, such as what incentives could be employed, how success can be gauged and monitored, and strategies for effective outreach to stakeholders.”
The significance of this work at a time when the already arid West is being ravaged by unprecedented drought cannot be overstated. Brant explains that California’s dominance in agricultural production does not come without a cost. “[The state’s] 40 million acres of farmland feed people across the country and the world. But in doing so, it also depletes, to dangerously low levels, one of our most precious resources – water. It is inevitable that to protect this resource, and the communities and ecosystems that rely on it, agriculture in the state will have to change.”
The students remain hopeful that their work will make a real difference for the future of groundwater sustainability.
Researchers on a second water project looking at both sustainability and equity in California’s groundwater adjudications express similar confidence. According to Johanna Flodin, who has teamed up with Hailey Rochin and Zulfiyya Kishiyeva in the aforementioned research, “The American West stands to benefit greatly from our policy analysis in the effort towards a more sustainable and equitable future.”
Flodin, Rochin and Kishiyeva are engaged in an assessment of the status of California’s 29 adjudicated groundwater basins - those regulated by a court order - to understand how these basins are being managed. The study will home in on how the water needs of vulnerable communities are being considered in these important groundwater basins, which are critical during a drought.
“Disadvantaged communities and tribes often suffer the most when water is scarce,” writes Kishiyeva, whose specific contribution to the project has included the use of ArcGis Pro to create detailed maps of disadvantaged communities within the adjudicated groundwater basins. “As climate change leads to more frequent and severe droughts, it's essential that groundwater management includes everyone’s needs,” she adds.
As for Flodin’s part, she has focused on analyzing a basin that has had success aligning with several goals of the SGMA. “While the full analysis of Six Basins is not complete, they are shaping up to be a model adjudicated basin that is not only realizing the need to move towards a more equitable and sustainable future, but also recognizing the need for flexibility in its already established policies to reach their goals,” she writes.
This research on sustainable, equitable groundwater policy is part of California’s Fifth Climate Change Assessment and is being undertaken as part of a larger study led by UC Santa Cruz.
Two groups of research assistants are looking at other aspects of water and climate resilience, with one investigating tap water quality and another examining greenhouse gas removal strategies in the American West.
The first project, known as ‘The Tap Water Trust Project,’ is a collaboration between Stanford, Nuestra Casa in East Palo Alto, and We the People Detroit. Led by Khalid Osman, professor of civil and environmental engineering, the study employs bi-monthly water quality testing to analyze variations in water quality and determine compliance with state regulatory standards at the household level. With The Osman Lab, Lane Center RA Sinna Nick is trying to assess household interactions with and observations of drinking water quality; identify water usage patterns; ascertain residents’ trust in their water; and understand associated health and welfare impacts.
The project’s objective, says Nick, is to empower community members by giving them the tools to identify their household’s water quality issues and effectively advocate for their community's needs. Why focus on household perceptions of tap water when the city is supposed to regularly monitor it? According to Nick, this testing is “often…done at the source and not at the household level, so there exists a gap in terms of what residents are told their water quality is, and the water quality they might actually be experiencing.” Nick hopes that her research will address that gap by centering the communities that often experience water inequities, understanding their tap water distrust, and using this distrust as a possible indicator of unsafe tap water. The study’s findings may help validate the role humans play in the prediction and detection of infrastructure failure.
A fourth project in the category of ‘climate resilience’ seeks to develop just and equitable deployment of greenhouse gas removal (GHGR) strategies in the American West. The investigation, led by E-IPER doctoral student Celina Scott-Beuchler, will examine the social, political, and justice constraints on GHGR and work with various stakeholders in the climate movement to establish principles for the fair implementation of carbon removal strategies.
Students Jolie Barga and Paridhi Bhatia have undertaken research on this project with the guidance of Scott-Beuchler. Bhatia has conducted Geographic Information System (GIS) modeling, and Barga has been analyzing focus group data from five California communities to better understand their perceptions of GHGR technologies. The researchers will eventually turn their focus to the development of potential policies for GHGR in the American West. For now, they are hoping to augment the abundant sustainability research on carbon sequestration (which removes carbon dioxide from its source of production) with work on lesser-studied carbon dioxide removal methods (which take already-existing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere).
Wildfire
Over 7,000 wildfires blazed throughout California in 2023 alone, burning close to 325,000 acres of land. As the climate warms, the West will continue to face the health, safety, environmental and economic challenges imposed by these devastating conflagrations, which is why another group of students has partnered with the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority (MWPA) to address wildfire risks in Marin County. The project’s researchers include Ramsey Doueiri, Hazel Jones, Pallavi Khambam, and Siddhartha Daswani (a high school student in the Stanford Young Investigator Program). Derek Fong, lecturer in civil and environmental engineering and Lane Center affiliated scholar, played an important role in mentoring the student team, especially Daswani’s summer research.
The MWPA and its member agencies seek to mitigate wildfire risk by conducting large-scale vegetation management efforts and regular home inspections to ensure homeowners maintain defensible space around structures. Lane Center RAs have been diligently conducting summer research to inform the MWPA’s work, with each student looking at a different aspect of wildfire risk management.
Khambam is investigating current legislation and guidance for maintaining vegetation in zones closest to structures. Jones has studied how to balance protection against extreme heat and fire risk in these areas. Doueiri’s contributions include the assessment and implementation of strategies to facilitate inspections within Homeowners Associations, and Daswani is trying to demonstrate how satellite-derived data can help assess the performance of vegetation management projects.
Each aspect of the research is integral to the whole, as Doueiri makes clear when he articulates how even the most strategic vegetation management can fail to take hold if these strategies are not communicated effectively to all stakeholders. “Federal and state funding for wildfire prevention exists and has a great potential to grow. But the funds lose significant utility if they are not distributed effectively. In order to improve this process, it is vital for all stakeholders to be knowledgeable and active in communication with one another.” Doueiri’s specific work will help establish a system for fire authorities to have improved and direct communication with community associations in their region. In turn, this will allow the team’s risk-reduction research to become more actionable.
Energy and Transportation
In two separate projects, teams are researching different aspects of energy and transportation. With a focus on the future of regional transit planning in California, Kohi Kalandarova and Yosief Abraham are partnering with the nonprofit Seamless Bay Area to understand how transit planning might adapt to meet the state’s climate change goals. The study has involved analyzing the roles and limitations of current regional transit planning agencies, studying how current travel patterns overlay with existing regions, and developing recommendations for advancing transit coordination within and across regions in the state. Kalandarova and Abraham’s work has provided critical insights into optimizing public transit, with the potential to significantly boost ridership and system effectiveness.
The analysis Kalandarova performed this summer has been fairly technical – she has scrutinized travel trends, where people are going, where they are coming from, and the frequency of their travel. Through examination of these details, she has enabled the team to visualize the county or Metropolitan Planning Organization boundaries that are being crossed and think about how those boundaries might be redrawn to improve coordination and efficiency.
The societal benefits of research focused on streamlining public transit seem clear to Kalandarova and her research partner. According to Abraham, the project addresses the urgent urban challenges of “mobility, sustainability, increasing congestion, and environmental damages.” It also identifies weaknesses in the current public transit system and provides a pathway toward optimization with “reduced commute times, lower carbon emissions, increased economic mobility, reduced congestion, and increased walkability,” writes Abraham.
Ultimately, the team’s research aims to support the development of more efficient, equitable and sustainable cities. As such, it could serve as a model for urban communities across the American West facing similar transit challenges.
Another project in this category takes on the barriers faced by cities and counties in California as they attempt to transition their fleets to zero emission vehicles (ZEVs). Andrew Nevarez and Dev Madgavkar have been examining how local public agencies are meeting the requirements of the recent Advanced Clean Fleet regulations, which set out ambitious timelines for transitioning medium and heavy-duty vehicles to ZEVs.
The team has interviewed fleet managers and representatives from various local jurisdictions to understand their experiences with this transition: “We've identified several key barriers, including concerns about charging infrastructure and grid capacity, funding constraints, and dissatisfaction with the available Electric Vehicle (EV) technology,” Madgavkar explains. “Our goal is to help the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz) gain a clearer understanding of these challenges and to propose recommendations for expanding support to these local governments, making the transition to ZEVs more achievable for local jurisdictions as they seek to comply with the new regulations.”
With great success, past Lane Center collaborations with GO-Biz have addressed other obstacles faced by the state (especially permitting) as it attempts to transition to electric vehicles. Students are optimistic that their current work will yield similar positive results for California and beyond. As Nevarez writes, along with their goals of cleaner air, reduced health risks, and climate change adaptation for Californians, they hope to “[offer] a roadmap for other regions to follow as they work to reduce their carbon footprint.”
Arts and Culture
A number of self-designed projects creatively explore aspects of western art, culture, religion and politics through various disciplines.
Students Grace Carroll and Kyleigh McPeek have turned to audio recording with the production of a research-based podcast investigating the potential harm caused by the true crime podcasting industry. The first three episodes of their True Crime Podcast Podcast debuted in September, and they will stream the remaining episodes in the weeks to come.
“We've become obsessed with trying to understand why people make careers out of talking about homicide,” McPeek writes, “and why even more people walk around with their headphones blasting horrific details of kidnappings; why some podcasts can help solve murder cases, and why other podcasts seem to be slowly corroding the sanctity of the American legal system.”
The student podcast was born out of a journalism exercise undertaken by Carroll and McPeek looking at the ethical, legal and cultural impacts of the true crime podcasting industry. As an unregulated but highly popular genre, true crime podcasts may be encroaching on key legal practices during investigations and trials, the researchers found. Moreover, in their very ‘meta’ podcast about true crime podcasting, Carroll and McPeek wonder whether podcasters – believing they are advancing justice by helping to solve crimes – might actually be causing more harm to the families and communities impacted by these killings.
The significance of this research, McPeek suggests, lies in its underscoring of a cultural perversity that transforms brutal killings into entertainment: “Podcasting and social media…are revolutionizing the long-standing tradition of true crime storytelling, turning killings into content at a breakneck speed,” the researcher writes. The True Crime Podcast Podcast explores this ethical ambiguity over the course of six thought-provoking episodes. Gavin Jones, professor of English, serves as the mentor for this project.
In ‘The Mountain is Out,’ student researcher Emily Saletan has been developing a collection of original folk-acoustic songs exploring the aesthetic and cultural significance of what is known by many as Mt. Rainier. Saletan offers this explanation of her project’s title: “On a clear day, residents of the Pacific Northwest’s Puget Sound know to look for the ice-capped volcano in the distance. Locals share a familiar phrase when the region’s most iconic and beloved landmark is visible: ‘The mountain is out.’ The mountain has multiple names to the Indigenous tribes of the area. One of these names, ‘Tacoma,’ is also the name of my hometown. Mt. Tacoma is now known by the colonial name, Mt. Rainier.”
By the time she finished her research, however, Saletan had determined that she would no longer refer to the mountain as Rainier: “Out of respect and support for ongoing native initiatives to rename the mountain, I am not using the colonial name in my project. As a transplant to the land, I hope to contribute towards kindling awareness and further research both locally and around the world.”
Under the mentorship of Mark Applebaum, professor of composition, Saletan has composed her own music with the hope of inspiring curiosity about the mountain in listeners who know the landmark well, and in those who have never seen it. It seems the music speaks for the mountain, but it also speaks for itself.
In another project that incorporates both music and photography, Trinity Gardner has developed “Shanelands,” a research-based body of images and songs that investigates the construction and maintenance of dominant American Western narratives. The work aims to dissect popular media portrayals of the American West, with an emphasis on the ‘road trip’ and ‘Western’ genres. Shanelands, with its multi-media approach, creates a dialogue between these quintessential American genres, and subverts them to offer a nuanced and deeply personal perspective on the American West. Kai Carlson-Wee, a lecturer in American Studies and English, serves as Gardner’s mentor.
Describing her project as an ethnographic study in which she conducted research while driving across the West, Gardner used her road trip as an opportunity to make photographs that would interrogate Western mythology. She ultimately landed in Cody, Wyoming where she spent time photographing a rodeo and visited the filming locations of the motion picture, “Shane.” She then returned to the Bay Area to record songs intended to accompany the images.
Finally, Lila Mack spent the summer researching sociopolitical and cultural aspects of the West, delving into the intersections between religion and politics in Mexico. While much has been written about politics in the country at California’s southern border, the role of religion in politics – and particularly, the role of the growing evangelical movement – remains understudied. To deepen her knowledge of this subject, Mack examined how religious belief, affiliation, and engagement affect political ideology and voting patterns in Mexico. She also looked at the country’s growing evangelicalism, and its impact on citizen identification and engagement with indigenous and populist movements.
“Integrating an analysis of Mexican census data with semi-structured interviews, my summer research sought to better understand the forces behind [Mexican citizens’] increased affiliation with protestant and evangelical churches,” Mack writes of her research. She also was guided by the question of “how, if at all, this growing religious constituency has reshaped the relationship between religious and political institutions in the country.”
Mack’s project was mentored by Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
The Lane Center community looks forward to hearing the 2024 research assistants present on their projects in the coming weeks and months. Their work can be added to the growing collection of original American Western scholarship produced by the Bill Lane Center year after year.
