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The Hydrologic Implications Of Unique Urban Soil Horizon Sequencing On The Functions Of Passive Green Infrastructure
Citation:
Shuster, W., L. Schifman, AND D. Herrmann. The Hydrologic Implications Of Unique Urban Soil Horizon Sequencing On The Functions Of Passive Green Infrastructure. Am. Geophysical Union, New Orleans, LA, December 11 - 15, 2017.
Impact/Purpose:
These results contribute to our understanding to what extent passive green infrastructures may feasibly and economically contribute, for example, to achieving compliance with Clean Water Act enforcement actions.
Description:
Green infrastructure represents a broad set of site- to landscape-scale practices that can be flexibly implemented to increase sewershed retention capacity, and can thereby improve on the management of water quantity and quality. Although much green infrastructure presents as formal engineered designs, urbanized landscapes with highly-interspersed pervious surfaces (e.g., right-of-way, parks, lawns, vacant land) may offer ecosystem services as passive, infiltrative green infrastructure. Yet, infiltration and drainage processes are regulated by soil surface conditions, and then the layering of subsoil horizons, respectively. Drawing on a unique urban soil taxonomic and hydrologic dataset collected in 12 cities (each city representing a major soil order), we determined how urbanization processes altered the sequence of soil horizons (compared to pre-urbanized reference soil pedons) and modeled the hydrologic implications of these shifts in layering with an unsaturated zone code (HYDRUS2D). We found that the different layering sequences in urbanized soils render different types and extents of supporting (plant-available soil water), provisioning (productive vegetation), and regulating (runoff mitigation) ecosystem services. These results contribute to our understanding to what extent passive green infrastructures may feasibly and economically contribute, for example, to achieving compliance with Clean Water Act enforcement actions.