Grantee Research Project Results
Final Report: GIS Enabled Green Infrastructure Design Tool
EPA Grant Number: SU839286Title: GIS Enabled Green Infrastructure Design Tool
Investigators: Graettinger, Andrew , Pitt, Robert E. , Blackwell, Aaron , Martin-Rodriguez, Arianna , Greer, Ashton , Khanam, Mariam , Elliott, Mark , May, Matthew-Lane , Swartz, Raegan , Smith, Randy , Cohen, Sagy
Institution: The University of Alabama
EPA Project Officer: Page, Angela
Phase: I
Project Period: January 1, 2018 through December 31, 2018
Project Amount: $13,909
RFA: P3 Awards: A National Student Design Competition for Sustainability Focusing on People, Prosperity and the Planet (2017) RFA Text | Recipients Lists
Research Category: P3 Awards , Sustainable and Healthy Communities , P3 Challenge Area - Sustainable and Healthy Communities
Objective:
Green infrastructure is an environmentally conscious approach to water management that mimics the natural water cycle by means like permeable pavements, rain gardens, and vegetated swales, which deliver water quality and habitat improvements. Despite the benefits, barriers such as lack of knowledge of performance, design, and cost, along with lack of time and resources are barriers to agencies that could potentially incorporate green infrastructure instead of traditional grey infrastructure.
A large and time-consuming component of the design process for green infrastructure components is spatially based. It was thus theorized that advanced spatial analysis software such as a geographic information system (GIS) would be a useful and efficient tool for designing green infrastructure, leading to environmentally-friendly infrastructure implementation. The goal of this research project is to reduce the barriers to green infrastructure implementation by developing an open-source GIS based decision support and design tool.
The deliverable for Phase I of the project is an open-source GIS based design framework and a pilot tool to design swales for small watersheds in urban environments. The innovative aspects of this project include utilizing GIS as the primary tool for analyzing and designing green infrastructure, specifically vegetated swales, as well as providing preliminary cost estimate figures and environmental benefit analyses. The tool is user-friendly and makes innovative use of widely available elevation, land cover, rainfall, and soil datasets. In addition, the tool will increase the knowledge base and awareness of green infrastructure, thereby enabling practitioners and municipalities to make informed decisions about sustainable designs.
Summary/Accomplishments (Outputs/Outcomes):
The GIS-based design tool framework identifies potential areas for green infrastructure and prompts a user to select a specific location and enter relevant design parameters. The tool subsequently accesses open-source data such as elevation, land cover, rainfall, and soil data and iteratively designs green infrastructure options. The output of the tool is a preliminary design, a cost estimate, and the estimated environmental benefit gained from the proposed green infrastructure. The tool was used to produce swale designs on The University of Alabama campus for testing and demonstration purposes.
Conclusions:
Through this project, the research team has demonstrated that not only is it possible to design green infrastructure using a GIS-based approach, but that it can be done efficiently and by making use of widely available data sets. The project team successfully developed a methodology to automatically extract the hydrological and spatial data that serve as inputs for a swale design, as well as successfully developed an algorithm to iteratively determine design parameters for the most optimal swale for a site.
Throughout the remainder of the project period, the team plans to disseminate the tool through face-to-face outreach with stakeholders including both public and private partners as well as through web-based dissemination actions. This will allow the team to receive stakeholder input and adjust the tool accordingly. Additionally, presenting this research will heighten awareness of the tool and also awareness that green infrastructure opportunities are often overlooked due to a lack of knowledge of their design. It is thought that increasing the knowledge base around this issue will lead to measurable water quality and health outcomes in the future.
The primary objective of Phase II is to increase the availability and usefulness of the GIS-based tool. The strategies that will be implemented to achieve these objectives include:
- Incorporating high resolution data such as terrestrial LiDAR from which to automatically extract design parameters
- Presenting on our project to state, national, and international audiences
- Continued testing of our model with industry and local government partners
- Additional inclusion of green infrastructure education components within courses at The University of Alabama during the 2019-2020 school year
Supplemental Keywords:
Pollution prevention, open-source, GIS, Design tool, sustainable water managementThe perspectives, information and conclusions conveyed in research project abstracts, progress reports, final reports, journal abstracts and journal publications convey the viewpoints of the principal investigator and may not represent the views and policies of ORD and EPA. Conclusions drawn by the principal investigators have not been reviewed by the Agency.