Featured Post from University of Florida

How UF researchers are helping Floridians to build resilience

Nov 27, 2025

6 min


CaptionResizeWrap TextRemove


When Hurricane Idalia hit the Big Bend region of Florida in 2023, Jeff Carney and his team were watching.


A coalition of architects, planners, and landscape architects led by Carney worked closely with the tiny Gulf island of Cedar Key, which is particularly vulnerable to hurricanes, to prepare for this moment. The researchers had modeled for city officials how a major storm would flood the city’s core services.


“Idalia caused flooding exactly where the maps said it would, including city hall, the historic downtown, older homes, and many streets,” Carney said. After the storm, Cedar Key moved city hall to higher ground, as outlined in the plan.


And just in time.


Barely a year later, Cedar Key was hit even harder by Hurricane Helene. Between the storms, Carney’s group had worked with the city to refine their storm preparation. The new plan focused more on resilience-boosting projects, like improving drainage around the city. Cedar Key finalized their plans just weeks before Helene.


“A lot of the projects we put forward in this plan are in the process of seeking additional funding after Helene,” Carney said.


A professor of architecture at the University of Florida, Carney directs the Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience, or FIBER. A research institute in UF’s College of Design, Construction and Planning, FIBER engages with communities to understand how the designs of buildings and cities expose Floridians to risks — not just storms, but also excessive heat, poor air quality, even a lack of health care.


FIBER faculty then work with cities to mitigate these hazards. By preparing for emergencies, upgrading buildings, and providing targeted services, communities across Florida are bolstering the resilience of their residents, all with expert help from UF researchers.


Preparing to weather big storms

That kind of resilience is especially important for some of Florida’s most vulnerable residents. Older and poorer Floridians face higher-than-average risks from natural disasters and other environmental hazards.


That vulnerability was apparent in Cedar Key as it weathered the last two hurricane seasons. Centered around aquaculture and tourism, Cedar Key seems in many ways to be thriving. Yet, with the feel of a small fishing village, roughly 13% of its nearly 1,000 full-time residents are considered to be financially disadvantaged, according to U.S. Census data.


Poorer residents may also have a harder time walking away from coastal communities devastated by storms. With savings invested into damaged homes and jobs tied to the local area, less-wealthy residents often have no choice but to stay and rebuild. Carney’s team helps people see the opportunities for rebuilding with a clearer vision of a future where rising sea levels are a reality.


“You capture people’s attention and excitement when you can offer them options that are not doomsday,” said Carney, who has been working in Pine Island and Matlacha in Southwest Florida’s Lee County to help residents affected by recent storms prepare for the future.


“There’s a lot of opportunity for rebuilding as long as you don’t try to have it be business as usual. We help people see how redevelopment can provide a community asset for the future,” he added. “We try to paint the picture of all the possible scenarios so people can find their own comfort level. It puts them in the driver’s seat.”


Aging with fewer choices

While that kind of agency is empowering, it can be harder to come by as people retire and find themselves facing tough decisions on fixed incomes.


That’s a common experience in Florida, which has a larger proportion of seniors than any other state, due in part to its popularity as a retirement destination. More than 10% of Americans over the age of 65 live below the federal poverty line. This population often finds themselves moving to less safe places as they age.


“Older people with more social vulnerability — such as low income or poor health — have a tendency to move to worse places,” said Yan Wang, Ph.D., a professor of urban and regional planning in the UF College of Design, Construction and Planning. “They are more likely to move to places with less economic stability, with less access to health care, and with more exposure to extreme weather.”


Wang and postdoctoral researcher Shangde Gao, Ph.D., recently published a study that uncovered the risks low-income seniors face when moving. Compared to their peers with higher incomes, poorer seniors were more likely to end up in neighborhoods lacking access to health care facilities.


To address these kinds of disparities, UF Health has launched mobile health units that can reach people who have trouble traveling to health centers, including low-income seniors. The Mobile Outreach Clinic provides primary care and referrals for specialists. And the newly launched cancer screening vehicle, which serves all of North Central Florida, can help catch the disease in the early stages when it is easiest to treat.


It’s not just finding health care that’s a struggle. Older adults from minority racial groups were also more likely to increase their exposure to poor air quality and to natural disasters like flooding and hurricanes when they moved, Wang and Gao discovered.


“If we understand the trend and causes of these income disparities better, we could better prepare some places with more health care resources or better hurricane preparation for these older populations,” Wang said.


Building safer, healthier homes

That preparation is happening right now in Jacksonville, not just for big storms but for the everyday nuisances and hazards — even the ones people are exposed to in their own homes — that threaten people’s lives and health.


The Jacksonville Restore and Repair for Resiliency research initiative was founded to address these kinds of risks while improving energy efficiency. The R3 initiative, as it’s known, is a home remodeling program organized by a slew of community partners and supported by FIBER research on the impact of housing quality on health. The project aims to keep longtime residents of the Historic Eastside in their homes while addressing the home hazards that put people at risk for medical complications like asthma attacks and emergency room visits.


“The designs of buildings impact human health and well-being,” said Lisa Platt, Ph.D., the lead researcher with the Jacksonville program and an assistant professor of interior design with FIBER. “Our research is helping the team prioritize the home improvements that will benefit residents’ health the most.”


Jacksonville’s Eastside faces a lot of challenges. The population is older than the city as a whole. Roughly three-quarters of residents are over the age of 60, and the poverty rate is over 40%.


Yet more than a third of residents own their own homes. Often passed down from previous generations, some of the houses are now over a century old and struggle to keep the intense Florida heat and humidity out.


Platt’s research has modeled how things like high heat days — only growing more common in a warming world —are associated with increased emergency room use and poor perceived physical and mental health. That science helps guide the community partners to prioritize providing air conditioning and better insulation to protect Historic Eastside residents.


To date, the Jacksonville program is targeting up to 70 homes for renovation. Builders have fixed holes in roofs, replaced drafty windows, and hooked up air conditioning for the first time, keeping the heat and humidity at bay and protecting residents’ health. Now the R3 initiative is applying for federal grants to expand the program.


“I think the best way to approach this kind of community action research is with humility and outreach. Community members have amazing expertise. I always say, ‘I can build models to analyze the problem, but you are the ones that are the experts,’” Platt said. “That’s where UF can be most useful, is coming in from a perspective of service.”

Powered by

You might also like...

Check out some other posts from University of Florida

4 min

Natural defenses: UF researchers use living infrastructure to protect Florida’s shores

Armed with a $7 million grant from the Army Corp of Engineers, University of Florida researchers are working to bolster shoreline resilience and restore troubled wetlands in St. Augustine through nature-based solutions. “The idea of nature-based solutions is to build what we sometimes refer to as green infrastructure, to use living, natural components as the building blocks,” said Andrew Altieri, Ph.D., an assistant professor with the Engineering School of Sustainable Infrastructure & Environment and interim director of the Center for Coastal Solutions, also known as CCS. Instead of building man-made structures to protect wetlands, for example, restoration crews can move dredged natural sediment otherwise destined for costly disposal to increase wetlands’ size and elevation, restoring their ability to protect shorelines from storm surge, keep pace with sea-level change, filter toxins, store carbon and provide habitats for wildlife.  The project is in concert with the Army Corps of Engineers’ goal to naturally reuse and repurpose at least 70% of dredged sediment into other natural areas to benefit habitats and restoration by 2030. “It is critical to understand, test and model how natural processes can be harnessed and strategically implemented to sustainably meet the challenge of rapidly intensifying coastal hazards while also providing environmental, economic and social benefits,” Altieri wrote in the project’s technical summary. Overall, the multi-disciplinary project closely examines patterns and processes of change in coastal landscapes. That includes wetlands — marshes and mangroves — and beach/dune systems. The project comes as these coastal areas are facing threats both natural and human. These areas are essential to wildlife, air quality, native vegetation, storm protection and the overall health of the ecosystem. A 2008 study by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported a net loss of about 361,000 acres of wetlands in the coastal watersheds of the eastern United States between 1998 and 2004 — an average net decrease of 59,000 acres each year, with experts citing sea-level rise as one of the primary factors. “We're trying to understand the patterns of that loss and what's leading to it,” Altieri said. “These systems are essentially the first and sometimes last line of defense against coastal hazards, risks that include storm surges and coastal flooding. They are forming a buffer, this kind of protective layer on our coast. But they're changing, generally for the worse and are in danger of being lost.” With this project, the CCS-led research team plans to advance the science, technology and engineering principles of nature-based solutions. With marshes, the primary concern is elevation loss, which can drown the vegetation critical to the ecosystem. They are sinking, eroding and succumbing to sea-level changes, Altieri said. “The plants are really important for trapping sediment and holding sediment,” he said. “You lose some of the plants, then you get more erosional loss and a lack of the accumulation of sediment.” Sediment is natural muck on the bottom of water bodies. “If we can add sufficient sediment to increase the elevation to a level where the plants thrive, then they will retain that sediment that's been added to hopefully trap more sediment and accumulate more biomass through their growth,” Altieri said. “It’s something that may need to be done periodically. You may stop that decline, but you may even reverse the process of loss and change the trajectory.” As a bonus, this process saves the cost of disposing of dredged sediment, which is usually piped offshore or to a materials-management area. This project is the next step for CCS-led coastal resilience efforts in St. Augustine. In 2024, CCS and WSP Environment & Infrastructure Inc. launched a coastal wetlands-restoration project to keep pace with sea level change and erosion. The 2025 work is a standalone project with separate funding, Altieri said. The current project also has more research disciplines and project partners, including UF researchers from Landscape Architecture, Geological Sciences and the School of Forest, Fisheries and Geomatic Sciences. “Storm surges, wave energy, coastal flooding – all of that can be slowed or reduced because of wetlands,” Altieri said. “They are basically like shock absorbers. These wetlands, beaches and dunes can be lost or eroded to some degree, but the upland area behind them is essentially protected.” Researching the resilience of dunes comes with a different set of dynamics. Here, they are looking at the plants that support the dunes – sea oats and panic grass, for example. That vegetation also provides a habitat for animals such as beach mice, turtles and birds. On the beach, the team also is looking at water energy and how grain size affects the stability of dunes. “It’s understanding water movement, water energy. How is that interacting with depositing sediment, moving sediment around, sorting sediment? With water, you tend to carry finer particles further than coarser materials,” he said. What does success look like after the award’s five years end? “We'll have an understanding of what's changing on our coasts and why,” Altieri said. “We'll have an understanding of how we can work within this system to modify the natural components and utilize the natural processes. And we will hopefully be working with partners through additional funding mechanisms to actually apply that towards implementation of solutions to increase coastal resilience.” The team also includes Peter Adams, Department of Geological Sciences; Julie Bruck, Department of Landscape Architecture, School of Landscape Architecture and Planning; Maitane Olabarrieta, ESSIE; Alex Sheremet, ESSIE; Nina Stark, ESSIE; Ben Wilkinson, Geomatics Program, School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatics Sciences; and Xiao Yu, ESSIE.

3 min

Florida scientists champion ‘Food Is Medicine’ movement to tackle national health crisis​

University of Florida researchers are calling for a national transformation in how we address the ongoing epidemic of obesity and Type 2 diabetes, starting with a fundamental shift in how we approach health, agriculture and food. Published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the article argues that fruits and vegetables must be treated not just as food — but as medicine.  With 73% of U.S. adults and 35% of children classified as overweight or obese, the authors warn that the crisis is not only an individual health issue but a national economic and security threat.  Andrew Hanson, Ph.D., a co-author and professor of horticultural sciences at UF/IFAS, emphasized a sense of urgency and collective responsibility toward solving this health crisis.  “This isn’t business as usual. We’re taking a public-interest view. This is the kind of thing we all need to be talking about. It’s too important not to,” he said.  The article proposes a roadmap for change, including creating five National Institutes of Health-supported “Food Is Medicine” centers across the U.S., with Florida as a leading candidate; scaling up domestic fruit and vegetable production to meet national dietary needs; partnering with food producer and processors to make healthy foods more accessible, affordable and appealing; and reforming medical and nutrition education to include horticultural sciences and vice versa. The article highlights that only 1 in 10 adults meets the recommended daily intake of fruits and vegetables, and that U.S. production falls far short of what’s needed to support a healthy population. The authors call for a dramatic expansion of fruit and vegetable production, especially high-impact crops like berries, leafy greens and carrots.  Christopher Gunter, Ph.D., professor and chair of the UF/IFAS Department of Horticultural Sciences, said the team’s goal is to push the role fruit and vegetables crops can play in improving human health into the national consciousness. “As a discipline, horticulture and the science of fruit and vegetables have been largely ignored in this conversation,” Gunter said. “Our goal is to move the needle on health with fruit and vegetables.”   Hanson said about 80% of the nation’s cropland is used to grow soybeans, corn and wheat — most of which are processed into products with low nutritional value that contribute to the obesity and Type 2 diabetes epidemic.  Mike Jaffee, M.D., a co-author and professor of neurology in the UF College of Medicine, stressed the broader implications of a high-vegetable diet on brain health.  “Obesity and insulin resistance are linked to inflammation and neurodegeneration. We’re living longer, but our brains aren’t keeping up. That’s where the real cost to individuals and the health care system comes in,” he said.  Gunter agreed, adding, “This epidemic reduces the longevity and productivity of our citizens. It limits the momentum communities need to grow healthy and resilient families.”  Hanson pointed out that higher socioeconomic groups are better positioned to meet dietary recommendations, making this not just a health issue, but a deeply embedded social and economic one.  “This crisis takes an unduly large toll on people with lower incomes and less time. To eat enough fruits and vegetables in the current system, you need substantial income and time to prepare food. That’s a luxury many don’t have,” he said.  The authors argue that farmers bring essential knowledge to the table.   “They understand how environmental factors impact nutritional quality,” Gunter said.

4 min

Researchers warn of rise in AI-created non-consensual explicit images

A team of researchers, including Kevin Butler, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the University of Florida, is sounding the alarm on a disturbing trend in artificial intelligence: the rapid rise of AI-generated sexually explicit images created without the subject’s consent. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Butler and colleagues from UF, Georgetown University and the University of Washington investigated a growing class of tools that allow users to generate realistic nude images from uploaded photos — tools that require little skill, cost virtually nothing and are largely unregulated. “Anybody can do this,” said Butler, director of the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research. “It’s done on the web, often anonymously, and there’s no meaningful enforcement of age or consent.” The team has coined the term SNEACI, short for synthetic non-consensual explicit AI-created imagery, to define this new category of abuse. The acronym, pronounced “sneaky,” highlights the secretive and deceptive nature of the practice. “SNEACI really typifies the fact that a lot of these are made without the knowledge of the potential victim and often in very sneaky ways,” said Patrick Traynor, a professor and associate chair of research in UF's Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering and co-author of the paper. In their study, which will be presented at the upcoming USENIX Security Symposium this summer, the researchers conducted a systematic analysis of 20 AI “nudification” websites. These platforms allow users to upload an image, manipulate clothing, body shape and pose, and generate a sexually explicit photo — usually in seconds. Unlike traditional tools like Photoshop, these AI services remove nearly all barriers to entry, Butler said. “Photoshop requires skill, time and money,” he said. “These AI application websites are fast, cheap — from free to as little as six cents per image — and don’t require any expertise.” According to the team’s review, women are disproportionately targeted, but the technology can be used on anyone, including children. While the researchers did not test tools with images of minors due to legal and ethical constraints, they found “no technical safeguards preventing someone from doing so.” Only seven of the 20 sites they examined included terms of service that require image subjects to be over 18, and even fewer enforced any kind of user age verification. “Even when sites asked users to confirm they were over 18, there was no real validation,” Butler said. “It’s an unregulated environment.” The platforms operate with little transparency, using cryptocurrency for payments and hosting on mainstream cloud providers. Seven of the sites studied used Amazon Web Services, and 12 were supported by Cloudflare — legitimate services that inadvertently support these operations. “There’s a misconception that this kind of content lives on the dark web,” Butler said. “In reality, many of these tools are hosted on reputable platforms.” Butler’s team also found little to no information about how the sites store or use the generated images. “We couldn’t find out what the generators are doing with the images once they’re created” he said. “It doesn’t appear that any of this information is deleted.” High-profile cases have already brought attention to the issue. Celebrities such as Taylor Swift and Melania Trump have reportedly been victims of AI-generated non-consensual explicit images. Earlier this year, Trump voiced support for the Take It Down Act, which targets these types of abuses and was signed into law this week by President Donald Trump. But the impact extends beyond the famous. Butler cited a case in South Florida where a city councilwoman stepped down after fake explicit images of her — created using AI — were circulated online. “These images aren’t just created for amusement,” Butler said. “They’re used to embarrass, humiliate and even extort victims. The mental health toll can be devastating.” The researchers emphasized that the technology enabling these abuses was originally developed for beneficial purposes — such as enhancing computer vision or supporting academic research — and is often shared openly in the AI community. “There’s an emerging conversation in the machine learning community about whether some of these tools should be restricted,” Butler said. “We need to rethink how open-source technologies are shared and used.” Butler said the published paper — authored by student Cassidy Gibson, who was advised by Butler and Traynor and received her doctorate degree this month — is just the first step in their deeper investigation into the world of AI-powered nudification tools and an extension of the work they are doing at the Center for Privacy and Security for Marginalized Populations, or PRISM, an NSF-funded center housed at the UF Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering. Butler and Gibson recently met with U.S. Congresswoman Kat Cammack for a roundtable discussion on the growing spread of non-consensual imagery online. In a newsletter to constituents, Cammack, who serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, called the issue a major priority. She emphasized the need to understand how these images are created and their impact on the mental health of children, teens and adults, calling it “paramount to putting an end to this dangerous trend.” "As lawmakers take a closer look at these technologies, we want to give them technical insights that can help shape smarter regulation and push for more accountability from those involved," said Butler. “Our goal is to use our skills as cybersecurity researchers to address real-world problems and help people.”

View all posts
Powered by