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POTENTIAL AQUATIC COMMUNITY IMPROVEMENT THROUGH A MULTIDISCIPLINARY STORMWATER MANAGEMENT EXPERIMENT
Citation:
MAYER, A. L., A. ROY, L. A. BOCZEK, W. D. SHUSTER, H. W. THURSTON, AND M. CLAGETT. POTENTIAL AQUATIC COMMUNITY IMPROVEMENT THROUGH A MULTIDISCIPLINARY STORMWATER MANAGEMENT EXPERIMENT. Presented at Annual Meeting of Society for Conservation Biology, Brasilia, BRAZIL, July 15 - 19, 2005.
Impact/Purpose:
To inform the public.
Description:
Small-scale urban stream restoration efforts (e.g., riparian planting and in-stream habitat structures) often fail to improve ecological structure and function due the continuous hydrologic and chemical disturbances posed by impervious surfaces upstream. Decentralized stormwater management (e.g., infiltrating runoff at sources and disconnecting stormwater pipes) may improve stream ecosystems by increasing stream baseflows, reducing erosional stormflows, and reducing delivery of pollutants into streams. In a small watershed (~150 ha) in Cincinnati, OH, we have begun a runoff mitigation project involving ecologists, economists, hydrologists, and lawyers. This project will distribute parcel-level Best Management Practices (BMPs) for stormwater mitigation, in the form of rain gardens and rain barrels, into a residential area of the watershed based on the outcome of a voluntary economic auction among residents. We will be testing whether the auction will result in enough BMP installation to observe improved hydrological and ecological conditions in downstream sites. We have established six monitoring stations throughout the watershed, at which several years of baseline data will be collected prior to the installation of the rain gardens and barrels. Preliminary data demonstrate that these headwater urban stream reaches are characterized by low macroinvertebrate EPT richness, low proportional abundance of diatoms, high conductivity and high concentrations of E.coli and fecal coliform bacteria. We expect that sites directly downstream from the BMP installation area will show the greatest improvement of stream ecological condition relative to the other monitoring sites.