The Environmental Exposure & Health AI Praxis Lab at the University of Utah Honors College is a student-led initiative examining how urban design affects temperature, public health, and energy costs in Salt Lake City. This year, the lab is studying the proposed Green Loop and its potential to reduce urban heat while easing energy insecurity for residents.

Students treat the proposed Green Loop as a living laboratory. By combining community surveys, geospatial analysis, and artificial intelligence, they investigate whether trees, shaded pathways, and connected green spaces could lower neighborhood temperatures and reduce household energy bills.

Like many cities, Salt Lake City experiences the urban heat island effect, in which dense infrastructure and limited tree canopy cause urban areas to be warmer than surrounding regions. Expanding green infrastructure could help cool neighborhoods where people live and work, particularly for residents most vulnerable to extreme heat.

Community Surveys and Energy Insecurity

A key component of the project involves conducting community surveys to assess energy insecurity and residents’ experiences with heat. These surveys help the students better understand how heat and energy costs affect residents’ daily lives.

The team aims to collect 200 surveys: 150 within the Green Loop area and 50 outside it for comparison. Surveys focus primarily on single-family and duplex homes, where residents typically pay their own electricity bills. Apartments are generally excluded when landlords control temperature settings, since tenants may not directly manage energy use.

Survey collection is concentrated within the Green Loop corridor and nearby neighborhoods. High school students from a nearby rural school assist with data collection, gaining experience in ethical research practices and survey methods while helping to expand the project’s reach.

Students administer surveys using tablets and follow best practices such as avoiding leading questions and clearly explaining the study.

Student Learning and Community Engagement

For many Honors students, the lab connects classroom learning with community engagement.

Kylie Hunt, one of the four lab members, reflected on the experience:

“At first, I was worried about how the project connected to my major, but as we’ve worked more with urban ecology and the architectural model, it’s really helped. I’ve also grown up in Utah, so I especially love the surveying. It’s cool talking to people in the same city I might never have met otherwise, and it makes me feel more connected to my community.”

Mapping Heat and Predicting Cooling Impacts

Survey responses are combined with spatial analysis to understand how environmental features affect heat exposure and energy use. Students integrate their findings with environmental datasets such as EPA BioAtlas land-cover data, tree-canopy measurements, and park-proximity metrics.

This work builds on earlier efforts by instructor Rob Wilson, who previously co-created a city-wide Urban Heat Island map with NOAA and Salt Lake City’s Office of Sustainability.

Students are also developing a workflow to analyze the Green Loop’s cooling potential. They begin by identifying roughly 50 comparable green-infrastructure case studies from the past five decades, including projects in Salt Lake City, South Korea, and Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway.

Environmental data from these sites is collected using Landsat satellite imagery, which provides infrared and spectral data across 30-by-30-meter pixels. Using QGIS, students digitize each study area by mapping the green space, drawing a central midline, and creating perpendicular transects. Sampling points along these transects allow them to extract land surface temperature (LST) data and analyze how temperatures change with distance from the park.

Conceptually, the Green Loop is treated as a large “swamp cooler.” By analyzing temperature gradients along the transects, students estimate how far cooling effects extend into surrounding neighborhoods. Case studies are stratified by climate similarity to Salt Lake City while still including some out-of-region examples for comparison.

Machine learning techniques, including neural networks and Random Forest algorithms, are then used to model temperature reductions and predict impacts on neighborhood energy demand.

Moving Forward: Honors Student Showcase

The semester will culminate in the Honors Spring Showcase, where students present their findings and display an architectural model of the proposed Green Loop. Visitors will have the opportunity to learn how the team used surveys, environmental data, and artificial intelligence to better understand how green energy could help cool Salt Lake City.

To learn more about the students’ findings firsthand, attend the Honors Student Showcase on Wednesday, April 15, from 4-7 PM at Kahlert Village.

Tia Wisco | Journalism Intern, University of Utah Honors College