Visualizing Ecosystem Land Management Assessments (VELMA) 2.1 Modeling Tool
Citation:
U.S. EPA. Visualizing Ecosystem Land Management Assessments (VELMA) 2.1 Modeling Tool. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, 2022.
Impact/Purpose:
Impact
The Visualizing Ecosystems for Land Management Assessment (VELMA) eco-hydrological model version 2.1 was built by the US Environmental Protection Agency. VELMA is designed to assist users in predicting the effectiveness of alternative green infrastructure (GI) scenarios for protecting water quality and quantity, and also estimates potential ecosystem service co-benefits and tradeoffsDescription:
EPA announced the release of VELMA 2.1 Model and accompanying supplemental user's guide (Apr 2022) on the EPA website. EPA's VELMA tool helps assessor's model effective decisions for a wide array of environmental issues. It is a spatially explicit ecohydrological watershed model that planners can use to visualize the effects of their decisions. VELMA can be used to help improve the water quality of streams, rivers, and estuaries by making better use of both natural and engineered green infrastructure (GI) to control loadings from point and nonpoint sources of pollution. It is designed to help users assess green infrastructure options for controlling the fate and transport of water, nutrients, and toxics across multiple spatial and temporal scales for different ecoregions and present and future climates. VELMA also addresses GI maintenance and longevity to predict how once-effective riparian buffers can fail, depending upon contaminant loads, soil properties, changes in climate and other factors. VELMA was designed for use by communities, land managers, policy makers, and scientists and engineers.
Updates
The VELMA ecohydrological model has been updated from version 2.0 to 2.1 for assessing the effectiveness of green and gray infrastructure options for reducing storm water contaminant loads to aquatic systems. Details of the hydrological and biogeochemical processes controlling spatial and temporal dynamics of the fate and transport of 6PPD-Quinone and other toxins from points of deposition to stream and estuary are poorly understood. This VELMA update includes high-resolution (10-m) spatiotemporal estimations and animations of urban contaminant fate and transport for various alternative green and gray infrastructure treatments.Note: View VELMA disclaimer following download of the model.
URLs/Downloads:
VELMA v.2.1 Downloadable ApplicationVELMA Supplement to VELMA 2.0 User Manual (PDF, 293 pp, 13506 KB, about PDF)
VELMA 2.0 User Manual (2014) (PDF, 180 pp, 8701 KB, about PDF)