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Measuring the impacts of green stormwater infrastructure on ?stream health
Citation:
Hopkins, K. Measuring the impacts of green stormwater infrastructure on ?stream health. 2019 North Carolina Water Resources Research Institute, Raleigh, NC, March 21, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
This research examines the effectiveness of green infrastructure in combating the negative impacts of urbanization on stream ecosystem communities. Research outputs will guide future green infrastrucuture implementation efforts by using a holistic, watershed scale approach to understand their effectiveness in mitigating the negative ecological outcomes of urbanization.
Description:
Green stormwater infrastructure is being increasingly implemented to treat polluted stormwater runoff in urban and suburban areas. This approach uses stormwater control practices with small drainage areas (e.g., rain garden) instead of large facilities with large contributing areas (e.g., detention ponds). We assessed the impacts of suburban development green stormwater infrastructure implementation by monitoring two small agricultural watersheds in the Maryland Piedmont before, during, and after development (2000-2017). Stream health was assessed by monitoring streamflow, water quality, and benthic macroinvertebrates over this period. Watershed-scale installation of green stormwater infrastructure was not able to completely mitigate the impacts of development on streamflow, water quality, or benthic macroinvertebrate communities, but stream conditions in both green infrastructure watersheds were not as degraded as conditions in the urban control site.
