For our Environmental Science and Policy Capstone project at the University of Maryland, we were assigned a Montgomery County Parks project. The goals of this capstone project were to inspire and increase community involvement to report invasive insect and disease pests and to inform residents about invasive tree pests, particularly educating residents on how to […]
Read More… from Obstacles to Community Participation in Reporting Pest-Related Tree Damage
This report provides recommendations to the Montgomery County Department of Parks on the management of four invasive pests: Asian longhorned beetle (Anoplophora glabripennis), spotted lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula), oak wilt, and thousand cankers disease in managed park regions. To prepare for these potential infestations, an analysis of the risk to current park tree populations was performed […]
Read More… from Susceptibility of Montgomery Park Trees to Emerging Invasive Pests
As a continuation of the Fall 2017 PALS project, Spring 2018 semester students from the community planning and engineering programs used advanced computer mapping tools (geographic information system, or GIS) to provide Prince George’s County with potential sites to build a second animal shelter. The team attempted to find land that the county already owned, […]
At the request of the Montgomery County Department of Parks, eight county recreation trails were visualized via 360° photos and video, to help develop a state-of-the-art bike stress index tailored toward mountain bike trails. Using the Google Street View platform to publish photos online as well as several GIS open-source datasets and analytic tools, approximately […]
Read More… from Visualizing Recreational Trails: Montgomery County, Maryland
This project’s goal was to construct innovative ways to promote composting through the Prince George’s County Composting Pilot Program, working with the County’s project manager Denice Curry. Throughout this semester, we split the investigations into four different Design Projects. In these Design Projects, we cultivated our interviewing skills, learning how to note details and analyze […]
Read More… from Prince George’s County Food Scraps Composting Pilot Program
Considering the economics, demographics and the background of the site, the vision for its development is an affordable residential project. The area surrounding the site is home to a older housing stock, with little to no new development in the immediate area. The economic makeup of the area is largely low-income and working-class citizens, many […]
Fairmount Park Apartments is the first rental apartment building in the Town of Fairmount Heights, Maryland, adjacent to Washington, D.C. It is a sustainable and community-oriented mixed-use development on 4.4 acres, of 171 units, 102 market-rate units and 69 affordable units aimed at 60 percent of AMI. It will include 7,000-square feet of ground floor […]
Safe Routes to School (SR2S) is a program that promotes student health by encouraging an active mode of transportation. “The Safe Routes to School National Partnership’s mission is to advance safe walking and bicycling to and from schools, and in daily life, to improve the health and well-being of America’s children and to foster the […]
This design-oriented, community service project has the potential to improve productivity in Montgomery County’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) by providing a central standardized management system. The project goal is to evaluate and assess existing cloudbased data storage systems for a future developer to implement. Client: Noune Sekhpossian, Noune.Sekhpossian@montgomerycountymd.gov DHHS collects ongoing data […]