Convenes and engages regional community, municipal, nonprofit, academic, philanthropic, and private sector partners to address resilience challenges like heat, water, energy, and equity through collective knowledge sharing, education, and problem solving.

Advances research and education on urban ecology and urban socio-ecological systems, as one of two LTER sites funded by the National Science Foundation that specifically studies urban ecology.

Engages key actors of dryland stewardship to develop use-inspired research, training and solutions for arid lands around the worldE

Leads spatially-explicit scientific and technological research focused on mitigating and adapting to global environmental change.