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MULTIDISCIPLINARY MANAGEMENT OF STORMWATER RUNOFF - THE SHEPHERD CREEK WATERSHED PILOT STUDY
Citation:
Shuster*, W D., A. Mayer*,A.L., H. W. Thurston*, AND M A. Taylor**. MULTIDISCIPLINARY MANAGEMENT OF STORMWATER RUNOFF - THE SHEPHERD CREEK WATERSHED PILOT STUDY. Presented at ASA-CSSA-SSSA International Annual Meeting, Seattle, WA, October 31 - November 04, 2004.
Impact/Purpose:
To inform the public
Description:
Increased stormwater runoff from urbanized areas is a primary degrading influence on environmental quality. In addition to ecological, hydrological, and consideration of soils and land cover, we find that economics and legal concepts play an important role in creating a sustainable, distributed approach to managing stormwater runoff in a previously-developed 150 ha watershed. The objectives of this study are to determine whether a decentralized stormwater management strategy will lead to significant improvement in environmental quality at the watershed scale; and if this economically-based market mechanism will provide incentives at an appropriate extent to install sufficient best management practices (BMPs) throughout a watershed to effect improvements in both hydrologic and ecological conditions along landscapes and stream reaches. Incentives for BMP placement are derived from stakeholders trading runoff volume versus detention capacity to achieve a preset watershed-level cap on runoff. To date, we have implemented a before-after/control-impact (BACI) experimental design and initiated baseline monitoring of hydrologic and ecological conditions in five headwater reaches, which represent either reference reaches; or reaches with increasing proximity to the source area, and that are expected to be impacted by BMP placement. We present a basic description of our experimental approach for this unique approach to stormwater management with a summary of field data and discussion of preliminary modeling results.