Citation:

Mayer, A., W. D. SHUSTER, J. BEAULIEU, M. HOPTON, L. K. RHEA, H. THURSTON, AND A. H. Roy. Building green infrastructure via citizen participation - a six-year study in the Shepherd Creek. ENVIRONMENTAL PRACTICE. Oxford University Press, Cary, NC, 14(1):57-67, (2012).

Impact/Purpose:

To inform the public

Description:

Green infrastructure at the parcel scale provides critical ecosystem goods and services when these services (such as flood mitigation) must be provided locally. Here we report on an approach that encourages suburban landowners to mitigate impervious surfaces on their properties through a voluntary auction mechanism. We used an economic incentive to place rain gardens and rain barrels onto parcels in a 1.8 km2 watershed near Cincinnati, Ohio (USA). A comprehensive hydrologic, water quality, and ecological monitoring campaign documented pre- and post-treatment environmental conditions. In 2007 and 2008, we engaged private landowners through a reverse auction to encourage placement of one rain garden and up to four rain barrels on their property. The program led to the installation of 83 rain gardens and 176 rain barrels onto more than 20% of the properties, and preliminary analyses indicate the overall discharge regime was altered by the treatments. The length of the study may have precluded observation of treatment effects on water quality and aquatic biological communities, as we would expect these conditions to respond more slowly to management changes. When viewed as green infrastructure, these distributed stormwater installations contributed to ecosystem services such as flood protection, water supply and water infiltration, provided benefits to the local residents, and reduced the need for larger, expensive, centralized retrofits (such as deep tunnel storage).

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