@jennahgosciak.bsky.social showed how LLM assistance can improve government caseworker accuracy in the context of SNAP eligibility questions. It was really cool to see Jennah + team get ahead of the ever-shifting technical capacity of LLMs by varying chatbot accuracy.

I also looked compared historical vegetation coverage to the present-day, estimated via LiDAR imagery -- illustrating the (obvious) point that the city looks quite different today in terms of 🌳 green space!

My takeaway: historical wetlands and the Sandy inundation zone look almost identical; the relationship to stormwater flooding and flood vulnerability is less clear.

In particular, I was interested in examining how historical wetlands in the city correspond to modern-day
⛈ flooding risk (inspired by several articles that came out shortly after Hurricane Ida, and my own experience with neighborhood flooding in Hurricane Sandy).