ASHEVILLE, NC — Community and university leaders celebrated the opening of the new downtown location of RENCI at UNC Asheville on Oct. 1. The event featured a ceremonial ribbon cutting and messages of support for the Asheville center from Erskine Bowles, president of the University of North Carolina System, UNC Asheville Chancellor Anne Ponder and Asheville Mayor Terry Bellamy.

RENCI at UNC Asheville is a university, government and private sector partnership and was the first RENCI engagement center to open outside the Triangle area. For the last three years, the center has operated out of space at the Enka campus of Asheville-Buncombe Community College. The new site puts RENCI in the historic Grove Arcade in downtown Asheville and within easy walking distance of community and business leaders and researchers at the National Climate Data Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The city of Asheville agreed to pay the rent for the downtown space in appreciation of the collaborations the site will foster among area businesses, government, and federal and university researchers.

An open house, which followed the grand opening ceremony, featured demonstrations of work being done at the Asheville center, including computer modeling to understand the effects of floods and landslides in the region and computer tools for mapping natural hazard risks for emergency officials responding to floods, landslides, wildfire and other threats around Buncombe County.

Jim Fox, director of RENCI at UNC Asheville, welcomes visitors to the new RENCI center as UNC System President Erskine Bowles, far right, and Asheville Mayor Terry Bellamy, second from right, look on.

Bowles said the RENCI center is an example of what the university system and the city can do if they leverage their resources and work together.

“You can use the analytical tools that we have here as a catalyst for decision makers to help them find the balance between economic growth and preserving the natural beauty that we have here,” he said.

RENCI Director Stan Ahalt attended the grand opening as part of his first week on the job.

“This engagement center clearly exemplifies why I took the job at RENCI,” said Ahalt. “This is a marvelous example of how the excellent research, the excellent science and the excellent knowledge developed at our university can be transferred into real impact for North Carolina.”

The Urban Growth Model, a tool created at RENCI at UNC Charlotte that shows urban development patterns over 30 years, was one of many ongoing projects on display. The model originally depicted growth in the Charlotte region but has been expanded to western North Carolina through funding from the city of Asheville and the U.S. Forest Service.

On the center’s 20-foot visualization wall, RENCI’s Jeffrey Hicks offered a close-up look at recent flooding in western North Carolina with live feeds from rain and stream gauges and a look at the persistent drought conditions in the eastern part of the state.

The center’s portable dome showed a computer simulation of flooding along the Swannanoa River and the RENCI ROVER (RENCI Outreach Vehicle for Education and Research) stood curbside, demonstrating hands-on curricula offered to youngsters through a partnership involving RENCI, the North Carolina Arboretum and other educational outreach organizations.

For more on the RENCI at UNC Asheville grand opening see The Asheville Citizen-Times story and video and WLOS ABC 13 story and video.

CHARLOTTE, NC–Researchers at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at UNC Charlotte will expand their study of development patterns in North Carolina to rapidly-growing counties in western North Carolina as well as the Triad and Research Triangle regions of the Piedmont.

The expansion of the urban growth study by RENCI at UNC Charlotte, the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute and the UNC Charlotte Center for Applied Geographic Information Science (CAGIS) is made possible by a grant from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation and by funding from the City of Asheville, the U.S. Forest Service and RENCI’s home office in Chapel Hill.

The original study, released in 2008, demonstrated rapid rates of urbanization, and resultant conversions of natural and rural lands, in the Charlotte region using satellite images.  That study found development in the Charlotte region had increased over 850 percent between 1976 and 2006 at a rate of 105 acres per day. The study also forecasted an additional 2.2 million acres to be developed by 2030, or 30 percent of the region’s landscape, with Mecklenburg County expected to convert all unprotected lands within 25 years. These findings resulted in a series of maps that can be viewed at the RENCI at UNC Charlotte website. Researchers at RENCI and UNC Charlotte’s Visualization Center are also developing the maps as interactive applications that can be manipulated with gestures on a touch-sensitive display.

“Since the 2008 study was released, policymakers throughout North Carolina have contacted us about expanding the urban growth model to cover the entire state,” noted Jeff Michael, director of RENCI at UNC Charlotte and the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute.  “We’re pleased that these funders, along with our research partners at RENCI at UNC Asheville, have given us this incredible opportunity to expand the project.”

Ross Meentemeyer, lead researcher for the UNC Charlotte team, added, “We are really excited about the ways in which this research can be used to understand how development impacts the state’s natural systems and its infrastructure, such as transportation and water.  Already, our researchers are looking more closely at the data covered in the original 2008 study and assessing such issues as the loss of forest cover and increasing per capita land consumption. We hope our findings will serve as a foundation for other research studies that will enhance our knowledge of growth’s impact on North Carolina.”

New study results will be available this fall with the release of data on four counties surrounding Asheville (Buncombe, Henderson, Madison and Transylvania) followed by a full report on land conversion rates in western North Carolina in the spring of 2010.  Reports on the Triad and Triangle areas will be available later in 2010.  Efforts are underway to secure funding to expand the analysis into eastern North Carolina.
The RENCI at UNC Charlotte engagement center is part of the statewide network of RENCI facilities that bring together researchers from the state’s academic institutions to address issues important to North Carolina and its economic competiveness. RENCI at UNC Charlotte involves faculty and staff from three UNC Charlotte research centers: the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, the Center for Applied Geographic Information Science and the Charlotte Visualization Center. RENCI also operates facilities at UNC Asheville, East Carolina University, UNC Chapel Hill, Duke University and NC State University as well as its flagship site off campus in Chapel Hill.

For more information, see the RENCI at UNC Charlotte website or the main RENCI website.