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Scaling green infrastructure to watersheds: Current insights and future directions
Citation:
Golden, H., N. Hoghooghi, AND B. Bledsoe. Scaling green infrastructure to watersheds: Current insights and future directions. Sixth Interagency Conference on Research in Watersheds, Shepherdstown, West Virginia, July 23 - 26, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
Presented at the 6th Interagency Conference on Research in Watersheds
Description:
Urbanization modifies watershed hydrological processes, such as evapotranspiration, soil water storage, and runoff, and therefore requires deliberate, targeted stormwater management. Green infrastructure (GI) is a decentralized approach to stormwater management that uses plants, soils, and landscape design, and is promoted as a sustainable method for attenuating the adverse water quality and quantity (e.g., flooding) effects from urbanizing systems. However, evidence on the efficacy of GI is primarily based on local-scale studies, such as plots and small homogeneous patches of landscapes – not watersheds, the widely established scale of water resources management. Here we present considerations and approaches for scaling local-scale water quantity and quality responses to GI to watersheds. We discuss important concepts emerging from GI research at the local scale, methods for scaling this research to watersheds, recent advances in scaling the effects of GI practices on water quality and quantity at watershed scales, and the use of combined novel measurements and models for these scaling efforts. We highlight these ideas with a case study that uses model simulations to assess how various types and configurations of GI practices affect watershed hydrology in a mixed land cover watershed. Our synthesis of recent research suggests that advances are being made to scale results from GI studies to watersheds, but we are still at the vanguard of what may become an expansive area of research.
URLs/Downloads:
http://www.cvent.com/events/6th-interagency-conference-on-research-in-the-watersheds/archived-3567aed4bb4040af82