DES Masters Student Maps Flood Risk Exposure
July 18, 2024
In addition to her research and work with CPRA, Hyde worked as a research mentor in the EnvironMentors program for two years.
BATON ROUGE - Environmental Sciences Masters student Anissa Hyde lives her life at two extremes.
On one end, Hyde can be found surrounded by people, as she gives tours to everyone from foreign dignitaries to kindergarteners at the LSU Center for River Studies, as part of her assistantship with the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Agency, or CPRA.
At the other, she can be found secreted away in her office, combing through piles of flood insurance data as she works to complete her thesis.
Time spent in her office crunching numbers and analyzing data is necessary for her ultimate goal: to complete her Master’s thesis on flooding risk exposure along the Gulf Coast but her work with CPRA helps as well.
Building strong science communications skills helps her improve the quality of her thesis and refine her ideas, said Hyde, who won the CC&E Oral Presentation Symposium last April.
People and Property
As part of DES Assistant Professor Thomas Douthat’s Environmental Policy and Governance lab, Hyde is conducting research that takes a novel approach on quantifying flooding risk exposure for communities along the Gulf Coast on a micro-scale.
Most previous attempts, she said, either focus on a specific event or location. She takes a more comprehensive approach, examining flood insurance claims from communities all along the coast, from Texas to Florida.
In general, communities around the Gulf of Mexico have a high level of exposure, simply because there is a lot of population. “[W]here there's the most people and property, there's the most exposure,” Hyde said.
Despite the Gulf Coast’s overall high level of exposure, each community still faces its own unique set of risks.
“What we have found is that it’s not as black and white as we would hope it to be,” Hyde said. “It’s not just about income, it’s not just about race, it’s not just about elevation.” She and Douthat are looking at different categories to potentially explain levels of risk exposure, things like social vulnerability, urban form, and scale.
In the end, there may not be a one-size fits all approach to protecting Gulf Coast communities.
“The scale is going to be different, the form of the urban structure is going to be different, and that social vulnerability is going to be different as well,” she said. In other words, what works in a county in Texas may not work in New Orleans.
Hyde will be completing her thesis in the next few months.
It’s been a journey, she said, and has given her a suite of technical skills, including spatial modeling, mapping, coding and data analysis, that she hopes to continue utilizing after graduation. “Every day I learn something new,” she said.