Ryan McManamay, Ph.D.
Associate Professor Baylor University
- Waco TX
Spatial ecologist that studies human-environmental systems in order to balance ecosystem and societal needs.
Media
Biography
Areas of Expertise
Accomplishments
Sustainability Science Award
Baylor University
2023
Education
Clemson University
B.S.
Biological Sciences
2004
Virginia Tech
M.S.
Biological Sciences
2007
Virginia Tech
Ph.D.
Fish and Wildlife Conservation
2011
Affiliations
- American Geophysical Union
- Society for Freshwater Science
- University Council on Water Resources
- Emerging Leaders in Environmental and Energy Policy (ELEEP) : Alumni
Media Appearances
How Baylor researchers are helping improve water quality in Texas and beyond
Baylor Proud online
2025-09-08
* The Future — What will water systems look like 50 or 100 years from now? Baylor researchers like Dr. Ryan McManamay are helping to prepare for that future. Using AI and environmental modeling, he forecasts urban growth and its impact on water infrastructure. That information helps cities like Waco plan to preserve water resources amidst dynamic future growth. Meanwhile, Brooks is tackling long-term threats like “forever chemicals” (PFAS), guiding national leaders toward cost-effective, science-based solutions.
Renewable Energy Goals Are Unattainable by 2050
Baylor University online
2024-02-12
WACO, Texas (Feb. 12, 2024) – More than 250 U.S. cities have made pledges to transition to 100% renewable energy sources by the year 2050. However, in a new study published in the journal Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability, Baylor University researchers Kayla P. Garrett, Ph.D., and Ryan A. McManamay, Ph.D., found that, despite efforts, the target date to move to fully sustainable energy sources is unrealistic because of economic barriers, leadership and government breakdowns and a misunderstanding of energy limitations.
This Dam Simple Trick Is a Big Green Energy Win
WIRED Magazine online
2021-11-16
In a retrofitted system, water falling through the dam would spin newly installed turbine blades connected to a generator—and that spinning would generate electricity that could be distributed to local homes or connected to a larger power grid. “How much more can we get out of revitalizing existing infrastructure, rather than expanding and building new infrastructure?” asks Ryan McManamay, an ecologist at Baylor University in Texas and coauthor of a paper exploring the untapped potential of non-powered dams. (McManamay’s own office in Waco is a short walk from one of these dams on the Brazos River. A wasted opportunity right on his doorstep, he points out.)
ORNL develops new capability to evaluate human-driven change in Eastern U.S. streams
Oak Ridge National Labratory online
2018-07-25
“This kind of holistic view of stream environments, specifically stream diversity, over a large spatial area has not been available and is essential to improving our understanding of natural and altered stream conditions,” said lead coauthor Ryan McManamay of ORNL’s Environmental Sciences Division and the Urban Dynamics Institute.
Articles
Protection of U.S. streams is insufficient to safeguard stream diversity and prevent habitat impairment
Communications Sustainability2026
Despite covering a small portion of Earth’s surface, streams support a disproportionate amount of biodiversity. Here, we measure progress against the Global Biodiversity Framework 30×30 protection target for streams within the conterminous U.S., in terms of quantity, representation, and effectiveness of habitat protection under primarily land-based protection strategies. We evaluated the geophysical and biogeographical diversity of streams falling under protection measures. Additionally, we expose a paradox of streams being protected yet simultaneously impaired from human disturbances. Without considering impairment, approximately 30% of streams are currently protected through land-based conservation of their local or upstream watersheds; when considering impairment, only 9% to 28% of streams are truly protected from disturbances depending on impairment thresholds and protection criteria.
Optical imaging and machine learning to identify and enumerate early developmental stages of fish species
Ecological Informatics2026
Larval fish are a key component for biomonitoring aquatic system health but are notoriously difficult to identify. While recent advances in optical imaging and artificial intelligence (AI) have assisted in identifying organisms, most applications for fish are limited to adults, not juveniles. Here, we evaluate the capabilities of AI to automatically identify and enumerate larval fish for use in taxonomic identification and aquaculture. To accomplish this, we used an optical imaging system and trained machine learning (ML) models, support vector machines (SVM) and convolutional neural networks (CNN), on eggs and at least two early larval stages of three fish species, channel catfish (CCF), Florida largemouth bass (FLLMB), and koi. When considering all species and life stages, accuracies ranged from 0.34 to 0.65 for SVM and CNNs, respectively; however, when non-target items (i.e., bubbles and detritus) were included, accuracies dramatically increased to 0.92 to 0.94 (SVM and CNN).
Sustainability and resilience through connection: the economic metacommunities of the Western USA
Ecology and Society2025
Regional social, environmental, and economic systems form a rich web of connections that both create opportunities and pose risks. Regional economies, characterized by their interconnectedness across jurisdictional boundaries, might be better managed at a transboundary scale because they can leverage a broad resource pool and greater economic diversity compared to a single jurisdiction alone. The technical challenge is to identify which economies are connected and could be managed collectively to better mitigate, absorb, and recover from disruptions. Economic risk management often occurs at the state level, but network approaches can identify groups that interact with one another based on actual commodity flows, capturing important features of the system that are not currently coordinated. One such approach, based on ecological theory, is to identify economic metacommunities.
Impact of thermoelectric power plant operations and water use reporting methods on thermoelectric power plant water use
Environmental Science & Technology2025
Thermoelectric power generation accounts for over 41% of total U.S. freshwater withdrawals, making understanding the determinants of power plants’ water withdrawals (WW) and consumption (WC) critical for reducing the sector’s reliance on increasingly scarce water resources. However, reported data inconsistencies and incomplete analysis of potential determinants of thermoelectric water use hinder such understanding. We address these challenges by introducing a novel data filtering method and a more complete assessment of water use determinants. First, we applied a power-cooling ratio as an operations-based data filter that removed operationally implausible records while retaining more original data, outperforming previous statistical filtering methods.
United States multi-sector land use and land cover base maps to support human and Earth system models
Scientific Data2025
Earth System Models (ESMs) require current and future projections of land use and landcover change (LULC) to simulate land-atmospheric interactions and global biogeochemical cycles. Among the most utilized land systems in ESMs are the Community Land Model (CLM) and the Land-Use Harmonization 2 (LUH2) products. Regional studies also use these products by extending coarse projections to finer resolutions via downscaling or by using multisector dynamic (MSD) models. One such MSD model is the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM), which has its own independent land module, but often relies on CLM or LUH2 as spatial inputs for its base years.
Extending shared socioeconomic pathways to future water supply infrastructure scenarios: a case study of San Antonio, TX
Environmental Research Communications2025
Municipal water supplies face increasing pressures from aging infrastructure, shortages, and declining quality, necessitating the exploration of alternative infrastructure futures as a critical aspect of addressing potential resource conflicts from growing populations. Multisector and integrated assessment modeling approaches can be used to evaluate alternative Water Supply Infrastructure (WSI) futures and their inherent uncertainties; however, to be compatible with other regional modeling efforts, these approaches first require constructing scenarios that assemble along mitigation and adaptation strategies as localized extensions of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs).
Urban morphology from a landscape perspective: how building morphology distribution land models (BMDLM) emulate pattern and process
Human Settlements and Sustainability2025
Urban form (e.g., building morphology such as height or footprint) can be used to predict environmental footprints, such as energy/water consumption and carbon emissions. Although progress has been made in predicting building characteristics to fill gaps in observation or derive 3-D representations, the relationships between morphology and other variables such as land use and population are poorly understood. Understanding these relationships may enable projections for how cities will evolve with landscapes in the future. A suite of random forest models, the Building Morphology Distribution Land Models (BMDLM), was developed to determine how well building morphology for two distinct statistical measures (central tendency and frequency) can be predicted using land use (e.g., zoning) and population at different resolutions.
Global Biodiversity Implications of Alternative Electrification Strategies Under the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways
Biological Conservation2021
Addressing climate mitigation while meeting global electrification goals will require major transitions from fossil-fuel dependence to large-scale renewable energy deployment. However, renewables require significant land assets per unit energy and could come at high cost to ecosystems, creating potential conflicts between global climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation. Here, we explore the potential biodiversity implications of alternative future global electrification pathways as depicted under the Shared Socioeconomic Scenarios (SSPs), i.e., alternative trends in societal development. We examined the intersection of high-resolution estimates of global energy densities for ten renewable and conventional technologies with global richness data to estimate technology-specific biodiversity footprints (species per GWh), whereas a Cumulative Biodiversity Impact (CBI) score was used to assess land and biodiversity outcomes of alternative scenarios.
Mapping hydrologic alteration and ecological consequences in stream reaches of the conterminous United States
Scientific Data2022
Environmental flows are critical for balancing societal water needs with that of riverine ecosystems; however, data limitations often hinder the development of predictive relationships between anthropogenic modifications to streamflow regimes and ecological responses – these relationships are the basis for setting regional water policy standards for rivers. Herein, we present and describe a comprehensive dataset of modeled hydrologic alteration and consequences for native fish biodiversity, both mapped at the stream-reach resolution for the conterminous U.S. Using empirical observations of reference conditions and anthropogenically altered streamflow at over 7000 stream gauges, we developed a predictive model of hydrologic alteration, which was extended to >2.6 million stream reaches.
Dynamic urban land extensification is projected to lead to imbalances in the global land-carbon equilibrium
Communications Earth & Environment2024
Human-Earth System Models and Integrated Assessment Models used to explore the land-atmosphere implications of future land-use transitions generally lack dynamic representation of urban lands. Here, we conduct an experiment incorporating dynamic urbanization in a multisector model framework. We integrate projected dynamic non-urban lands from a multisector model with projected dynamic urban lands from 2015 to 2100 at 1-km resolution to examine 1st-order implications to the land system, crop production, and net primary production that can arise from the competition over land resources. By 2100, future urban extensification could displace 0.1 to 1.4 million km2 of agriculture lands, leading to 22 to 310 Mt of compromised corn, rice, soybean, and wheat production.
Multifaceted economic impacts of a 500-year flood on gateway communities of Yellowstone National Park
International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction2024
Disasters can have dramatic implications for gateway communities of National Parks, especially local economies that rely on park tourist visitation as their primary source of income. In June 2022, a 500-year flood event impacted Yellowstone National Park (YNP) and gateway businesses, both directly through infrastructure damages (property loss) and indirectly through park closures and post-disaster marketing. We used a combination of approaches to document and explore the relative importance of these diverse sources of economic impacts. First, structured surveys were used to evaluate economic impacts, from the perspective of individual business owners and community leaders in six gateway communities surrounding YNP. Average revenue loss was 48 % during peak tourist season across all communities but averaged 75 % for communities inaccessible to the park.
